


Darkest Before the Dawn

by dualwieldteacup



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Harry Potter, Blind Draco Malfoy, Blindness, Cursed Draco Malfoy, Curses, Domestic, Endearments, Fairy Tale Curses, Fairy Tale Elements, Frottage, Gay Draco Malfoy, Getting Together, H/D Erised 2019, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Hogwarts, Hogwarts Professors, Holding Hands, Homophobic Language, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Legilimency, M/M, Magical Theory, Minor Cho Chang/Original Male Character, Mystery, POV Draco Malfoy, Parseltongue, Patronus, Pining, Posh Draco Malfoy, Post-Hogwarts, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Professor Draco Malfoy, Professor Harry Potter, Protective Harry Potter, Roommates, Sex in Thestral Carriage, Slow Burn, Snakes, Thestrals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:26:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 47,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21541321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dualwieldteacup/pseuds/dualwieldteacup
Summary: The last thing Draco wanted was to show up at Harry Potter's door, cursed blind and holding a boxful of his friends Transfigured into snakes, but here he was.Between breaking the curse, adjusting to life without sight, and teaching his Defence Against the Dark Arts classes, Draco's got his hands full. Being forced to live with Harry Potter might just be the death of him.This is a story about the bonds of friendship, fairy tale endings, and learning to ask for help (even from Gryffindors).
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 160
Kudos: 1755
Collections: H/D Erised 2019, My HP Favorites, all time favourites





	1. every demon wants his pound of flesh

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chachisoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chachisoo/gifts).



> This story owes a great deal to the classic fairy tale "The Wild Swans". You do not need to have read the tale to enjoy this fic; it will be summarised in Chapter 3.
> 
> Thank you to the mods for running this fest, and for granting me the extra time to bring my ideas to life completely. It's been a challenge and an incredible honour to take part in this.
> 
> Eternal gratitude to they-who-must-not-be-named for your unbelievable encouragement and friendship. I could not and would not have done this without you.
> 
> Platonic xoxo to C, my BBFF (blind best friend forever).
> 
> Finally, thank you so much to Cree! Your lovely art is a gift to the fandom and I went "OH YES" to your entire signup sheet from the moment I saw it. I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
> 
> Fic and chapter titles are borrowed from "Shake It Out" by Florence + the Machine.

The last thing Draco wanted was to show up at Harry Potter's door, cursed blind and holding a boxful of his friends Transfigured into snakes, but here he was.

“Potter,” he called, voice ricocheting off the stone in the deserted corridor.

No response.

Scowling, Draco shifted the crate so that its sharp edge dug into his hip, and knocked at the door five times. “Potter!”

Still nothing.

“Merlin’s almighty—” Draco fiddled with the chain around his neck, tugged out the pendant that had fallen underneath his heavy black professor’s robes, and gave it rather a harder whack than he’d intended. He was probably going to develop a nice round bruise on his sternum. Not that he’d ever be able to see it.

“Professor Harry Potter’s rooms,” the pendant verified, in its infuriatingly serene voice. “Harry Potter is Professor of Muggle Studies at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He is—”

“—the biggest pain in the arse wanker who has ever plagued my existence,” snarled Draco as he stuffed the pendant back under his robes, muffling its chatter. Adjusting the crate once again, since the snakes were squirming around and making the weight imbalanced, he grabbed his wand from his robe pocket. He was on the cusp of casting an _Alohomora_ on the door—or perhaps a much-deserved _Bombarda_ —when he heard it open.

Draco didn’t know whether he believed all the bullshit about the deprivation of one sense strengthening the others. But he could certainly tell the difference between the sound of shoes or slippers on a stone floor (anyone with a brain) and that of bare feet (Potter). And he could _absolutely_ distinguish the smell of someone who had spent the day with Lovegood, attempting to exercise seven unruly snakes but instead getting covered in vile cloacal fluid (himself) versus that of someone freshly scrubbed and emitting steamy scented waves of his mouthwatering cinnamon apple soap and shampoo (Harry Bloody Potter).

“Sorry, Malfoy. I was on a Floo call with Hermione.” At least he sounded a little sheepish.

“By all means, take your time. I was just getting comfortable,” Draco snapped, hefting the heavy crate pointedly.

A shifting noise, and a creak of the door. “Er, come in.”

Draco shouldered past him—careful not to bump into his chest, so solid and warm it didn’t bear thinking about—and stomped cautiously inside.

It’ll be perfect living with Potter, McGonagall had said. Absolutely grand. He can help you get used to being blind for the rest of your life _and_ do the sexy snake talk thing with your cursed friends.

Why Potter? Draco had asked, in between bouts of clawing at his eyes, glugging down a variety of unhelpful potions, and generally feeling sorry for himself in the too-small Hospital Wing cot. Why not Caleb Perez, the visiting Transfiguration scholar from Ilvermorny who  
(1) had the most firsthand experience since his sister was blind  
(2) was extremely fit, the last time Draco had looked  
(3) was the closest thing Draco had to a friend at school, since the other staff were all bloody ancient or the Class of 1999 War Heroes and therefore still probably hated Draco with every fibre of their being?

No, no, Malfoy, came the reply. Professor Perez has his hands full with Transfiguration classes and leading the choir. And Potter’s conveniently in a deluxe suite with an extra bedroom. It really will be for the best. Except for the part where he rearranges his sitting room furniture a million times a day, and leaves huge puddles of water on the floor for you to find with your socked feet, and wanders around without a dressing gown in November, _shirtless_ , so that when you reach out a hand to steady yourself and apologise, you touch not cotton or wool but his _hot, sculpted bare chest_. Chin up there, Malfoy. It’s not the end of the world.

Well, perhaps McGonagall hadn’t said it _precisely_ that way, but that was certainly the gist of it. Things could be worse, he supposed. He could be Transfigured into a snake.

Cursing quietly as he knocked his knee against a low piece of furniture, Draco shuffled through the sitting room and straight ahead towards his bedroom door, which he’d left ajar. He shoved it open and turned right, then edged his foot forward to find the dresser, with its glass enclosure on top.

“Do you want— I could— d’you need a hand?” Potter asked from the doorway.

“Not necessary. I’ll take an eye if you’ve got one, though.” Draco directed a sardonic glare in the direction of Potter’s voice and hefted the wooden crate onto the edge of the dresser. Then he upended it over the glass tank without so much as a by-your-leave.

A heavy _PLOP_ —that would be Greg, the enormous boa constrictor. Another, lighter _plop_ : Blaise, a green tree python, flashy and gorgeous. Typical Blaise.

He heard several smaller slithering sounds as the snakes slid from the crate into their tank. A rattlesnake (Theo), a copperhead (Millie), and two harmless garter snakes (Astoria and Daphne). Lastly, a little _thud_ as Pansy rolled out, her ball python body curled into a protective little knot. She hissed grumpily as Draco gave the crate one last shake.

“Not in the mood, Pansy,” he muttered, latching the lid closed before dropping the crate unceremoniously beside the dresser.

He jumped when Potter’s voice sounded again. “The house-elves finished bringing the last of your stuff over while you were with Luna.”

“Excellent. I’ll just fix my hair in my mirror, and write in my diary, then choose a nice book to read. Oh. Wait.” Draco began to unbutton his robes with sharp, savage movements of his fingers. They really did smell quite rank.

There was a now-familiar hiss from the tank, and Potter laughed softly. Apparently the man couldn’t take a hint. Surprise, surprise. “Parkinson says she’s cross with Luna, not you,” Potter offered. There was a little smile in his voice. Draco might not be able to navigate his way across a room yet without trailing his hand along the walls, but he could tell that much. “It sounds like Luna made her climb a little too much today. She’s never really liked exercise.”

It was that last bit that really tipped Draco over the edge. “Potter, you loathed Pansy when she was your classmate, so don’t pretend to be sympathetic now that she’s a snake. Don’t try to tell me what she’s always liked or disliked, because you have _no idea_ —” His voice broke, because of course it did. He whirled around, away from Potter, and clipped his shoulder on the bedpost on his way to their shared bathroom. He didn’t even bother begging Potter to leave him alone. If the man hadn’t learned his lesson yet about confronting Draco when he was upset in a bathroom, then no wizard living or dead had any bloody hope.

Draco sagged against the bathroom door, where he took several deep breaths before undoing his robes the rest of the way and letting them pool at his feet. He kicked off his shoes and socks, then added his shirt, trousers, pants, and Flitwick’s little pendant to the heap. It wasn’t like he could see wrinkles in his clothes anymore, anyway. He sighed and turned the bath taps on to their hottest setting.

Small blessing that the faculty lodgings were all the same general layout. He’d discovered that yesterday while navigating Potter’s bathroom and guest bedroom for the first time, hunched over, hands outstretched, already developing a fine assortment of bumps and bruises on his shins. Bathtub against the wall to his right; toilet against the opposite wall; and sink to the left. He hadn’t accounted for Potter leaving his toothbrush and soap and things directly on the counter (what kind of heathen didn’t own a soap dish?), but he’d managed to clear a space for his necessities: face moisturiser, body lotion, balms and potions and ointments.

Padding back across the bathroom floor, Draco switched off the taps and gingerly lowered himself into the piping-hot water with a groan. He’d tried, last night, to use his favourite vanilla bubble bath in some semblance of reestablishing his normal routine. Then he’d quickly discovered that it wasn’t the bath foam potion he’d poured into the water, but instead his thirty-Galleon-a-bottle Swiss conditioner. It hadn’t done any wonders for his mood.

No, tonight Draco was fine with plain old French milled lavender soap and hot water to start. He could sink beneath the surface of the water and pretend. Pretend that the all-encompassing black shadows behind his eyelids would disappear as soon as he rose above the water again, and that he would spend the rest of his life gazing at paintings and looking up at the stars and not bumping into things, and most importantly of all, that he wasn’t going to spend the foreseeable future cohabitating with The Boy Who Lived Twice, the object of his undying affection for two decades and counting.

…Maybe it couldn’t get worse after all.

* * *

It had happened like this:

They’d come from all over to celebrate Halloween together. Greg and Millie left their staff to run the restaurant; Blaise and Pansy popped over from the continent; Theo drove up from Cambridge and picked up the Greengrasses in London on his way. Draco left off marking his stacks of Defence Against the Dark Arts essays and went to meet them in Hogsmeade. The Three Broomsticks was a no-go, obviously (they were called Unforgivables for a reason, Draco admitted), so they squeezed into a corner at the more upscale Pygmy Pub.

Pansy downed several Irish coffees, claiming they were the best cure for Portkey-lag. The rest of them got silly and loose-limbed on various pints and cocktails. Then Theo had the brilliant idea to walk back to Hogwarts to (1) wax nostalgic as they ran around the hallways of their alma mater and (2) break into Filch’s office to snoop in the filing cabinet where the custodian stored impounded student contraband.

“He took away my very best pair of Omnioculars in eighth year,” Theo explained, sounding very reasonable on his fourth shot of Firewhisky. The rest of them nodded sympathetically, except for Draco, who was feeling apprehensive about being caught red-handed in the custodian’s private space, even if he was a trillion years old with rheumatism to boot. But the others shouted him down, and after a chilly walk from Hogsmeade, they were frolicking around the Entrance Hall and sliding down banisters with the vigour and laughter of schoolchildren a third their age.

Filch’s office door had been _Alohomora_ d; the _Confiscated and Highly Dangerous_ cabinet jimmied open, and its contents pawed through. They discovered not only Theo’s Omnioculars, but Marcus Flint’s old Quiz-Whiz Quill and a jinxed Quaffle that began to zoom around the room, knocking frames from the walls and toppling a container of cat treats.

“Let’s go back up to my rooms,” Draco called over the hubbub, as the Quaffle came dangerously close to ruffling his hair. “I’ve got a bottle of Ogden’s and Pansy’s half-asleep already.” So much for the coffee.

“Just a minute, there’s something else back here.” Theo had his arm deep in the open cabinet, almost to his shoulder, and withdrew it to hold out a slim velvet box. Draco hadn’t felt like getting up from his chair, so he held the Omnioculars up to his eyes to examine it from across the room. He saw Theo’s hands stroking the box curiously, tracing the serpentine shapes on the outside, before cracking it open. “Oh hey, it’s a snake—” he began, before a burst of bright white light enveloped the room.

And that was the last thing he had ever seen, or would ever see.

Draco sank deeper into the bubbly hot water, replaying the scene over and over again in his mind. He’d extracted two copies of the memory: one for the Ministry investigators and another for McGonagall’s Pensieve. The wizarding world’s top brains were currently scrutinising the memory for any hint of a clue as to what the cursed object had been.

Filch was proving an unreliable source; he oscillated between claiming that it had been found in the library’s Restricted Section during the summer of 1983, or that his predecessor Apollyon Pringle had left it when he bequeathed the office and the cabinet to Filch in the early 70s. In either case, he had no idea what the box had contained, as he had no use for any magical items, being a lowly Squib. At this point in the interrogation, Filch had burst into ugly tears and Pomfrey had been summoned to administer a Calming Draught.

Infuriatingly, the Ministry officials had been more concerned with the details of the curse than with the wellbeing of his seven friends, as evidenced by them entrusting their care to him and Loony Lovegood. Draco was torn between feeling protective of his serpentine companions, and feeling outraged that the Ministry really considered a barmy Magical Creatures fanatic and a newly blinded man the ideal caretakers. If today’s fiasco of a care session was anything to go by—Greg squeezing his leg so tightly that his toes had gone numb; Theo biting the sleeve of his robes instead of the Stunned mouse in his palm—it was certainly going to be a long road ahead.

The water was beginning to cool, and he’d left his wand out of reach with his clothes, so Draco stood, shivering. And wondered where the house-elves had put his towels. Yesterday he’d found one folded by the edge of the bath. It would’ve been a good thing to determine before he let the bathwater grow so cold.

After wandering around the bathroom, dripping and cross, he found a stack of fluffy towels by the far corner and wrapped one gratefully around his shoulders. Usually he would rub a dab of Sleakeazy’s and a drop of bergamot oil into his hair, but he didn’t want to repeat yesterday’s mistake with the bubble bath and douse his hair with shaving cream or something equally unimaginable. So he stooped to gather his clothes and wand, and made his way back into the bedroom.

Several minutes of shoving his hands into drawers oriented him with the house-elves’ organisation of his clothing. They had done their best to replicate the way his wardrobe had been laid out in his own rooms, bless them, and he was able to find clean boxers and pyjamas with minimal effort.

He had just stumbled into bed and pulled the covers up when a knock sounded at his door. Salazar, he hadn’t even thought to check that the door was closed when he came out of the bath. Five points to Gryffindor for being considerate, Potter.

“Hey.” Potter’s voice was gentle and bore no traces of the light, amused tone from earlier. “Are you hungry? I know you and Luna skipped dinner.”

Draco was sorely tempted to feign sleep, but Potter had surely just heard him banging around a moment earlier. “Better not. Lovegood was _kind_ enough to give a blow-by-blow narration as we fed them live mice tonight. It rather spoiled my appetite.”

“Ugh. I mean, sorry.” Pause. “It was Cornish pasties, you know. Saved you one each of beef and cheese-and-potato.”

Draco exhaled through his nose, willing his heart not to clench painfully. It did anyway.

Even though his limbs felt like lead, Draco folded the covers back and padded towards the door, only fumbling at thin air once before he successfully found the doorknob. Potter gently placed a heavy plate into his outstretched hand. He must have cast a Stasis Charm on it, because it was warm and smelled _fantastic_.

“Cheers,” he said quietly, too exhausted to think of something prickly to add. He was actually grateful that he couldn’t see right now; the look of earnest goodwill on Potter’s gorgeous face would probably have melted him.

“I don’t like the thought of anyone going to bed hungry.” There was a soft scritching noise, which Draco immediately registered as the sound of Potter rubbing the back of his neck. If the Weasley joke shop ever manufactured a Harry Potter action figure, it’d probably have three little features: _Expelliarmus_ , gobbling treacle tart, and that bloody neck scratch. Draco clasped the plate with both hands, as if holding it could make him feel any steadier on his feet.

“Er,” Potter continued. “Hermione thinks they’ve found something in your memory that’s worth a closer look. She wanted to charge over here and have you and McGonagall check it out right now, but I convinced her to wait until lunch tomorrow.”

“Too right. I like to think I’m past the age of being summoned to the Headmistress’ office in the middle of the night,” Draco replied. He actually had no idea what time it was. _Tempus_ wouldn’t do him any good, with its conjured image of a clock face hovering above one’s wand. Would he be condemned to lug a grandfather clock around along with his pendant, groping its hands to track the passing of the hours? What a depressing thought.

Potter shuffled in place before speaking again. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you this properly yesterday. But if you need anything, just ask. You can shout across the hall or just send me a Patronus, yeah?”

Whatever warmth remained from Draco’s bath immediately curdled in the deepest part of him, dragging cold, slimy claws down the inside of his chest as it settled. His strict Pureblood upbringing and a lifetime of suppressing his inconvenient feelings towards Potter were the only things that kept him from throwing the plate at Potter’s face and slamming the door.

He managed a silent nod. Potter rapped his knuckles on the doorframe and said, “I’ll let you get some rest. ‘Night, Malfoy.”

“Good night,” Draco mumbled, and he heard bare feet padding away. Numb and dismal, he attempted to set down the plate of now-unwanted supper on the little table by the door—

_CRASH!!_

—before he remembered that Potter’s guest room didn’t have a little table by the door. Of course. He gave a long sigh before staggering back towards the bed, praying to avoid shards of shattered porcelain in his feet.

Just one more item on the list of things he’d have to remember. Day Five of being blind and it was already a terribly long list.

* * *

When Draco woke the next morning, Potter was already off teaching his morning class, so he took the opportunity to familiarise himself with their living quarters. He was fairly certain that it wasn’t the best practice to suddenly move a blind person into completely unfamiliar surroundings, but he had to admit the circumstances were unprecedented. If there _was_ already a Hogwarts professor who’d been cursed sightless and forced to live with their schoolboy crush, Draco wanted a copy of their memoir and some advice, pronto.

First, however, he wandered over to the dresser and rested one hand gently on the outside of the tank. The glass was warm; with the enclosure being so large and the castle generally cold in the winter, Lovegood and Flitwick had set up an Everwarm Charm to keep his friends’ serpentine bodies from freezing. Draco could hear soft shifting noises from within, and spoke quietly.

“You’re all right, aren’t you? All of you? Haven’t given up on me yet?”

No response. Obviously.

“It’s been almost a week. But I’ll find a way to break the curse. You know I will. Even if I have to do it with help from Potter, of all people.”

A soft hiss, followed by another. That was more like it. Draco gave the glass a soft, fond tap before turning away. He decided to get dressed before he could get any more maudlin. It seemed that the house-elves had magicked away the broken plate and spilled food from last night, for which Draco was profoundly grateful. After sliding into his slippers and pulling his dressing gown over his pyjamas, he took Flitwick’s pendant and slid the chain over his head. Then he ventured out into their shared sitting room.

He trailed his hand along the wall as he explored the space: there was a tactile change between the smooth wallpaper and the rough brick of the Floo hearth. He knocked into the furniture with his knees and shins: a long sofa, a leather wingback chair, and another chair which was soft and squishy. Slow explorations with his fingertips found coat hooks by the door, bookcases against the wall (their contents totally jumbled in terms of size and shape; typical Potter), and shelves with picture frames and other keepsakes which he couldn’t decipher by touch alone.

In a corner which nearly rivalled the Room of Hidden Things was Potter’s desk, heaving with stacks of papers. The desk chair was heaped with clothes: scarves, coats, what felt like a leather jacket so worn that it had the texture of butter. And beside that was an untidy pile of brooms and other Quidditch equipment, which Draco promptly knocked over with a tremendous clatter. When he had shoved the brooms back against the wall, he decided he had better get dressed and begin the long trek down to the staffroom for what he was mentally calling the War Council.

He took some time to more thoroughly orient himself with the new layout of his clothes. The elves had hung his shirts in the wardrobe, arranged his shoes underneath, and folded trousers, undergarments, and socks in the dresser. Those were easy enough to figure out, and given his penchant for acquiring basic garments in the same family of greys, blues, and greens, he should be able to manage without looking like some sort of circus performer.

But Draco prided himself on details, and he wondered: how would he tell his black cashmere scarf apart from the navy one? Or his houndstooth waistcoat from his pinstriped? Not to mention the cufflinks, which were a bit jumbled in his jewellery box along with a few rings and other trinkets. He supposed he could use Sticking Charms to keep them paired, but would the pendant be able to help him distinguish between details like malachite versus emerald? The thought of wearing mismatched cufflinks sent a small frisson of horror up Draco’s spine.

Hoping for the best, Draco carefully folded his pyjamas and put on a fresh shirt, a pair of trousers, socks (thankfully, he was already in the habit of folding matching pairs together), and what he was fairly certain were his black leather Oxfords. Finally, he removed a fresh set of professor’s robes from the hook on the inside of the wardrobe and slid into them in a practiced movement.

There was a soft rattling noise from behind him. He’d nearly forgotten about the snakes, silent creatures that they were. He supposed he should be thankful they weren’t cockatiels or Crups or something equally noisy.

“Like you’ve never seen me getting dressed before, Theo,” Draco muttered, while stubbing his toe on the doorframe as he swept out of the room.

He had just stepped out of Potter’s suite and into the echoing stone corridor when someone called his name, sounding like they were approaching quickly. He clung to the doorknob, wanting to hunch his shoulders protectively and shrink back from the footfalls. It was damned inconvenient and quite frightening that he was unable to see who was running at him.

“Hey,” said the voice. Male, a bit out of breath, but warm and with a distinctive American intonation. Just as Draco managed to put a name to the man, he continued: “It’s Caleb. Sorry to run at you like that. I would’ve been here waiting for you but my morning class kept me late.”

Draco’s posture softened at the familiar voice of the handsome Transfiguration professor, and he was grateful that he’d taken the trouble to identify himself even though Draco picked him out by his distinctive accent. “Hello. You… were going to wait for me?” he asked, hand still hovering on the door knob.

“Of course. You didn’t think I’d leave you to get lost in some weird part of the castle on your first day alone, did you?”

Draco’s insides threatened to go all wiggly—the combination of Caleb’s very pleasant voice and the casual offering of assistance made the back of his neck feel quite warm. It was one thing to feel reluctant about asking for help, and another to gratefully accept an outstretched hand when it was offered. And Merlin, was he going to become the sort of person who was attracted to lovely _voices_ rather than nice eyes and smiles and cheekbones? It was a good thing that Caleb had both.

He must have sensed some of what was going on in Draco’s mind, because he gracefully went on: “I was going to show you how to walk with me as a sighted guide. It’s a good first step, I think, even if it doesn’t have the independent factor of a cane or a Seeing Eye Crup. Would that be okay?”

Draco’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. He managed a shaky, “Yes.”

“Great,” said Caleb, sounding like he was smiling. “First things first: I’m gonna have you hold on to my arm just above the elbow, and I’ll walk slightly ahead of you. Go ahead and grab on. Here I am…”

With only a slight hesitation, Draco finally let go of his anchoring doorknob. Caleb gently bumped the back of Draco’s left hand with his right, making it easy for Draco to trail his hand upward and take hold. He grabbed on just above Caleb’s elbow and drew closer, until he was just behind and to the side of his taller colleague.

“Great. Ready?” Caleb’s chest rumbled slightly with his deep baritone voice, buzzing against the back of Draco’s hand. He nodded, and they were off.

Walking just behind his friend took a little bit of getting used to, although Draco thought it preferable to his heretofore-preferred method of flailing about on his own with his arms outstretched. Caleb set a gentle but steady pace, heading down the corridor and towards the Grand Staircase. Draco could hear the chatter of many voices up ahead, and a distinct difference in the close floors and ceilings of Potter’s corridor versus the way sounds bounced around the passage which connected the castle from top to bottom.

“Step down in 3, 2, 1,” Caleb told him, turning a corner into the passage and pausing while Draco reached out his other hand to find the bannister. He led the way down, allowing Draco to pause cautiously when a pair of giggling students bustled past them, and again when someone ran past in a flurry of flapping cloak and squeaky shoes.

“How’s it going, living with Harry?” asked Caleb. Draco suspected it was as much out of curiosity as it was to keep him from concentrating overmuch on the previously simple act of walking.

“As well as can be expected.” He was gratified when Caleb gave a short laugh. “I think I scared him out of rearranging his furniture when I walked into a chair yesterday that hadn’t been there fifteen minutes before. I thought I had dropped most of my bad habits of swearing when I got out of university, but Potter has a way of bringing out the worst in me.” Draco paused, unsure whether that was much too revealing of a thing to drop between them at lunchtime on a Wednesday, but Caleb didn’t seem phased.

“He’ll learn. Let me know if he doesn’t and I’ll have words with him.” There was a pause where Draco was sure the other man would have dropped a wink if Draco could’ve seen it. “And honestly, let me know if there’s anything I can help with.”

“There is, actually.” Bolstered by the as-yet-disaster-free walk down three staircases and counting, Draco decided to be a bit brave. “I could use a hand with my clothes, if you’re interested.”

“…Oh?”

“Um!” Draco’s cheeks warmed as he realised how that sounded. “Just organising things. You know. Um. Cufflinks.”

“I’d be happy to help,” Caleb replied amiably. He rested his hand atop Draco’s and gave it a gentle squeeze in a ‘no harm done’ sort of way, then kept it there as they descended one last staircase and walked across the landing towards the staffroom. Draco couldn’t say he objected.

This area was much quieter than the rest of the castle. Most of the school were assembled in the Great Hall for lunch. They approached the staffroom door and Draco offered that week’s password to the lone surviving stone Gargoyle which guarded the entrance.

“ _Quattuor iunctus_.”

A heavy scraping noise indicated that the Gargoyle shifted to admit them, and Caleb led the way inside.

The first thing he noticed was the chatter of many voices. More than he’d been expecting. He knew Potter's voice immediately, of course. There was also McGonagall’s Scottish brogue, plus several others that were less distinct. The second thing he noticed was that his fervent hope of lunch was to be fulfilled. The aroma of warm food went directly to his very empty stomach, which gave another rumble.

“Here you go,” said Caleb, grinning, as he guided Draco’s hand to the back of a chair. “Can I get you some food?”

“Please.” Draco smiled gratefully in what he hoped was vaguely in Caleb’s direction. Then he slid his hand along the back and arm of the chair as he carefully manoeuvred his way into the seat.

McGonagall raised her voice. “Good afternoon, all. Let’s begin.” There was a series of scrapes, clatters, and bumps as the others assembled around the large table in the centre of the room. It was to be a working lunch, Draco surmised, as the sounds of clinking cutlery continued.

“How are our patients, Professor Malfoy?” McGonagall asked tactfully.

“Fine, I think. No change that Lovegood or I could observe last night.” _And even if something had been wrong this morning, I wouldn’t exactly know_ , he added in his head.

“I am glad to hear it. I’ve contacted their families and next of kin. Not to worry,” McGonagall added quickly at the alarmed expression that must have shown on Draco’s face. “I told them that unavoidable business had detained them at Hogwarts for the foreseeable future. I did not go into detail. Mr Goyle and Ms Bulstrode’s head of staff assured me that the restaurant would be run with utmost care in their absence, and the Greengrass sisters’ supervisors at the Ministry did not seem overly curious about their joint request for vacation time.”

Draco heard a soft shifting noise on his right as Caleb slid into a chair. He set several things down on the table in front of Draco. “Ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of water on your left. Tomato soup on the right, and a spoon on the far side,” he murmured under his breath. “And here’s a napkin.”

“I’m nominating you for the Order of Merlin,” Draco whispered back. He groped for the sandwich and took an enormous bite, sighing contentedly. He even closed his eyes in bliss, purely out of instinct.

“Ms Granger, any developments from your analysis of Mr Malfoy’s memories?” McGonagall was saying. Draco blinked before remembering that Potter had told him Granger would be here. It was quite disconcerting, not knowing who was sitting right in front of him. He would have to get in the habit of asking Caleb or somebody for a who’s-who of the room. Draco muffled his sigh against another bite of his toastie.

“Before we address that, Headmistress, I’d like to walk us through the timeline of that night, so we’re all on the same page. Here’s what we know.” Far on Draco’s left, Granger shuffled her parchment. Her businesslike tone had only grown more professional in her years as an accomplished Curse-Breaker for the Ministry. Draco had followed her exploits in the _Prophet_ with no small amount of respect.

“At approximately 10 p.m. on Thursday, Professor Malfoy and his friends left Hogsmeade on foot and arrived at Hogwarts half an hour later. Mr Nott expressed interest in visiting Caretaker Filch’s office, and they entered without incident.”

Draco gave a delicate snort. Filch couldn’t help it if he was a Squib, but honestly, what was the point of locking any doors in the castle when all the students learned _Alohomora_ in their first year? He reached for his water glass, miscalculated the distance, and promptly knocked it over.

“Oh, blast—”

“ _Evanesco_ ,” said the familiar and dreamy voice of Lovegood at his left elbow. “Would you like another glass of water, Draco?”

Draco let out a petulant sigh through his nose but was thirstier than he was irritable. “Much obliged,” he muttered.

Lovegood _Aguamenti_ d the glass full again and, to Draco’s slight surprise, placed the glass into his hovering hand. Thanking her twice in one morning was too much even for Draco to stomach, so he nodded slightly before lifting the glass to his lips. After a slight pause, Granger continued.

“Inside Caretaker Filch’s office, Mr Nott found a figurine of a snake. Based on our looks at Mr Malfoy’s memory, it was white or ivory in colour and housed in a slender box with a velveteen cover.” More parchment shuffling. Perhaps she was passing a drawing around the table. Draco attempted to eat his tomato soup without dribbling it down his chin.

Granger continued: “When Mr Nott touched the figurine, it emitted a bright white light and Mr Malfoy lost consciousness. We believe that it was during this time that the seven victims were Transfigured into their snake forms. They were discovered by Mr Filch when he went to his office at approximately 11:30 p.m. He had intended to clean up some Slipping Solution which Peeves had applied in the Entrance Hall. Mr Filch alerted Headmistress McGonagall, who in turn sent for the other staff. They arrived almost immediately, except for Professor Potter who was making the journey from Godric’s Hollow.”

Draco had been scraping his spoon around in an empty dish for a few minutes now. He suddenly let it fall with a clatter. He knew that Potter was never around for Halloween, and of course he also knew that it was the anniversary of his parents’ deaths—of the Dark Lord’s first defeat. Knowing that Potter had been called away from his parents’ graveside to help Draco made him feel extremely small, and he fervently wished for a shovel to dig a deep hole to throw himself into.

“Professor Malfoy and the others were transported up to the Hospital Wing for treatment and observation. Madam Pomfrey administered standard diagnostic spells. When Professor Malfoy regained consciousness, it became apparent that he had lost the ability of visual perception.”

(That was a very tactful way, Draco reflected, to sum up his original reaction, which was to thrash in the hospital cot while screaming _This isn’t funny! Somebody turn on the fucking lights! Theo, I swear to Salazar, you and your bloody pranks! Oh god, oh god—_ )

“Professor Flitwick retrieved an Omnivideo Pendant from his office while Professor Malfoy recounted the events for us and extracted a memory for further examination. His memory ends when the figurine emits the light, but we are hoping that we can extract memories from two other sources: his subconscious memory, and those of the, um… snakes.” Granger’s voice faltered for the first time during her speech.

There was a crash as Draco sprang out of his chair, knocking it backwards. “I beg your pardon. Are you seriously saying that we could have been communicating with my friends this whole time? That they could tell us—?”

“I’m not saying that at all,” Granger replied firmly. “We already know that their brain function is altered in these forms. They can express basic needs like hunger and cold and so forth, but they can’t recall all of their human thoughts and memories right now. That was one of the first things that I asked Har—Professor Potter to examine.” A few seats away, Potter coughed.

“Then how do you intend to access memories that took place before or during their transformation?” Draco demanded. “You would need, at the very least, an _extremely_ talented Legilimens—”

The staffroom door opened abruptly, letting in a gust of cold air from the corridor. “Hello hello, all! Sorry I’m late.”

“Cho!”

It was the first time Potter had spoken all during the meeting, and of bloody course it was to shout his ex-girlfriend’s name in delight. There were several flurried moments where Potter, Granger, Lovegood, and McGonagall scraped their chairs back to stand and greet the new arrival, and Caleb very tactfully righted Draco’s chair and guided his hand back to the armrest. Draco was too agitated to speak. The hubbub died down as he slid back into his seat.

“Hello, Draco,” said Chang with a casual ease he didn’t care for, dropping into a squeaky chair over to his right. “I’m working with the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes as a Senior Legilimens.” She paused and said in quite a different voice, “Hi. Cho Chang.”

“Caleb Perez, Transfiguration. Pleasure’s mine,” replied Caleb, sounding dazed.

Hoping to hell that what _seemed_ to be happening was not, in fact, happening, Draco gritted his teeth and said, “Delighted to have you along for the ride. So Chang here—” he turned back to around where Granger’s voice had emanated from, “—is going to do her mind-reading magic on me and seven snakes, to see if there’s any other information we can gather about the curse? About which we know absolutely nothing at the moment?"

“That’s the idea,” Granger replied, unphased by his tension. “I’ve examined the figurine and it appears to be completely devoid of magic now. I’m keeping it under several strong Stasis and Containment Charms in the Headmistress’ Office, but I don’t think it can give us any more clues. It seems like our best hope is to have Ms Chang attempt to extract the memories.”

“I think it’s an excellent place to start,” McGonagall agreed. “Professor Lovegood, would you please retrieve the smaller Pensieve from my office? Professor Potter, if you would take Ms Chang to the snakes.” Draco barely bit back an indignant shout. The only thing worse than Potter and Chang having a warm and fuzzy lovers’ reunion was it happening in Draco’s bedroom, of all places. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping more than ever that this was a horrible nightmare from which he would wake at any moment.

It wasn’t to be. The other staff members scooted their chairs back as they got up from the table and set out on their appointed tasks. Caleb placed his hand gently on Draco’s forearm and murmured, “Oh my _god_ , what a babe.”

“What?” snapped Draco, who was feverishly trying to remember if he’d left any old pairs of pants or something equally humiliating strewn around his bedroom that morning.

“Cho! Ms Chang. She’s _gorgeous_ ,” Caleb declared dreamily. “Were you friends in school?”

Draco fixed him with an injured glare. “All my friends are currently sporting scales and forked tongues. _No_ , I wasn’t pals with Chang. And I’m taking back that Order of Merlin,” he sniffed. “I was counting on you to be on my side, you know.”

“What can I say? I’m easily distractible.” Caleb was facing away from him, likely eyeing the door and eagerly waiting for Chang’s return. Draco had the fleeting thought that if— _when_ —Pansy recovered, she and Caleb would get along like a house on fire.

Someone at Draco’s shoulder cleared their throat. “Professor Malfoy. May I have a word?” McGonagall asked. Draco nodded, and she sat down beside him.

“I was thinking about your classes,” the Headmistress began. “I know we gave you this week to recover. I’m thinking about next week and beyond. I thought you might benefit from some help in the classroom.”

Draco’s shoulders slumped. He had very studiously _not_ been thinking about returning to his classroom since this whole mess began. Not only was he now very behind on marking, he was delayed at least a week in all of his classes’ curriculum. Merlin only knew how dreadful the sixth years’ nonverbal spells would be after a week without his tutelage.

“What kind of help?” he ventured, half-knowing the answer already.

McGonagall cleared her throat again. “Ms Chang is an excellent teacher. She received top marks in Defence as a student, and leads classes for the new recruits in Accidental Magic Reversal. I think she would be an excellent asset. Not to _replace_ you as instructor,” she was quick to add, “but I think it would be handy to have a helping hand until this business is sorted out. Do you agree?”

Draco pursed his lips as his mind processed the suggestion. When he had applied for the Defence position five years ago, it had made a lot of sense. It was a high-paying, high-profile, relatively low-risk way to put his education and freshly completed apprenticeship to fine use. And he found that he rather enjoyed teaching, especially a subject which had been misunderstood and misused so egregiously in his past. He’d been a bit wary in the beginning about working alongside Longbottom and Lovegood, but they were both Gryffindor (and Gryffindor-adjacent) enough to accept his apologies with a nod and a handshake, and devote themselves respectively to Bubotubers and Skrewts rather than reminding him what a holy horror he’d been to them in school.

It had been a not-entirely-pleasant surprise when Potter was hired two years after that to teach Muggle Studies. On one hand, Draco thought it was hilarious that one of the most powerful wizards in the world, the man who’d brought down the Dark Lord first as a baby and then again at age seventeen, was planning on spending his days teaching teenagers how to ride bicycles and use the In-tra-net.

On the other hand, once again sleeping in the same building as Potter—sharing meals and bumping into one another in the library and watching him chew on Sugar Quills at boring staff meetings—was _not_ hilarious. For eight years, Draco had pined for Potter in close proximity. He thought he’d served his time, as it were. It made this sudden sharing of rooms and a bath not the euphoric fantasy that his sixteen-year-old self had imagined in frequent classroom daydreams and behind the shelter of four-poster hangings, but a sort of exquisite torture: a red-hot brand held an inch away from his skin but never, ever, ever touching.

And now, to have Potter’s ex-girlfriend about, laughing and being a professional Legilimens like that wasn’t the coolest job in the world, _helping him_ …! Draco hated accepting help, and hated asking for it even more. His father had always linked needing help with a weakness of spirit and general unworthiness, which might explain some things about Draco’s character if he ever took a moment to pick them apart. Good thing the man was in Azkaban and thus unable to see the moment where Draco caved and replied:

“..............Sure.”

McGonagall laid a hand on his shoulder in a _there’s a good chap_ sort of pat, and everyone else bustled back into the room.

Lovegood floated the Pensieve onto the table with a delicacy that nevertheless made all the plates and utensils rattle, so someone cleared them all away to the sideboard, which was all for the best as Draco had lost anything that remained of his appetite. He waited with trepidation as the others moved around, not speaking. It wasn’t reasonable to expect everyone to narrate their actions, but Merlin, it was frustrating just listening to the sounds of feet shuffling and wood creaking. Draco took a deep breath, trying to settle his nerves.

“I was able to get a bit from Ms Parkinson’s memory,” Chang said at last, seeming to sense both Draco’s inquisitive tension and that of the other staff members. “But it’s… it’s hard to explain. It’s partly from her human consciousness, and part snake. So I hope Harry can help us decipher it. Ready?”

Potter must have nodded, because then Draco heard the sound of a vial being uncorked, followed by the soft splash of him plunging his head into the basin.

Draco fidgeted in his seat. Why they all had to be present for this was beyond him; it seemed unnecessary for half the staff to be sitting around on tenterhooks while Potter viewed the memory. Then again, they were all used to making exceptions for Potter, so Draco guessed this shouldn’t be any different.

After what seemed like an age, Potter surfaced, taking a deep breath. There was an expectant pause.

“Er, right. Okay. Does anyone have a quill and parchment?”

The stationery was produced, and another splash indicated that Potter had gone back into the Pensieve. Then, the soft scratching of a quill. This cycle repeated twice more before Draco was squirming in anticipation and gripping the armrests so tightly that he was certain they’d splinter at any moment. Potter surfaced from the Pensieve with a deep breath, wrote on the parchment once more, and then there was silence.

Draco slowly counted to three before he couldn’t take it anymore. “Will someone _please_ tell me what is going on?!”

Potter let out a long, shaky breath. “It was… difficult to understand,” he began, _scritch-scritching_ at the back of his neck. “I think the memory was formed during her transformation, because it was definitely half Parseltongue. And there was a blurry bit in the middle. I saw Filch’s office sort of flickering in and out of view, and it was all distorted… But then all seven of them—Bulstrode and Zabini and the rest—they all chanted this Parseltongue… poem… thing.” There was a light tap as he indicated the parchment.

Well. That was helpful. Draco’s jaw worked soundlessly and he began to calculate the distance across the table so he could lunge across it and throttle Potter with his bare hands.

Thankfully, Caleb cleared his throat and reached for the parchment, sliding it over to their side of the table. In his beautiful baritone, he read aloud:

Seek thou out in deathly lands  
The thorn whose flowers starlike bloom  
Weave thou cloth with thine own hands  
And garb the damned against their doom

If thou failst, the villains all  
Will live their lives as serpentkind  
And thou, O Failed Champion—  
Evermore shalt thou be blind

The ensuing silence was deafening.

Then everyone began to speak at once.

“‘Deathly lands’?” Granger demanded. “What could that mean? Like a battlefield, or a—?”

“Weaving cloth…? Thorn cloth? I’ve never even heard of—”

“—so it’s a permanent curse, then? But Headmistress, aren’t all Transfigurations subject to the Third Law of Fundamental Alteration—?”

“Interesting that a poem conceived in Parseltongue should have such a neat rhyme scheme in English,” Lovegood said to no one in particular.

Draco was trembling, standing from his chair without being quite conscious of his actions. He repeated the poem in his head as his heart began to pound alarmingly, his mouth suddenly dry and his hands cold and shaking. _Garb the damned against their doom. Live their lives as serpentkind. Evermore shalt thou be blind._ So he might be able to recover his sight after all? But only if—

He grasped for the table, something to lean against, to ground him. But his head spun and his throat had closed up and even as Caleb was saying, “Oh my god, Draco, are you okay—?” he felt his control slipping.

And because his life truly could not get any worse, with his boss and his colleagues and two women whom he’d been dreadful to as a child and Harry Parselmouth Potter as his audience, Draco let out a pathetic little moan and slipped into a dead faint.


	2. i can see no way

The following morning, Draco decided that he hated the Hospital Wing. He had got his fill of it during both the Hippogriff fiasco and the _Sectumsempra_ incident. The astringent odour of antiseptic bothered his sensitive nose, the cot squeaked every time he shifted, and the flimsy curtain drawn around him did very little to camouflage the whispers and vapid chatter of students who were there to get Quidditch sprains and Potions boils seen to.

But it was still better than facing Potter after the humiliating way he’d collapsed at the staff meeting. Salazar _wept_. Draco dragged a flimsy pillow over his overheated face and did his best to disappear. But shortly thereafter, Caleb appeared by his bedside to give him an update and to sneak him a cinnamon bun for breakfast. Draco wolfed it down grouchily while Caleb gave his report, and if Pomfrey saw the flaky crumbs on his blanket later, she didn’t say a word.

McGonagall had decided that taking the poem at face value was their best course of action. Granger would research the snake figurine and the nature of its curse. Lovegood would help Draco with care and feedings twice a week, or as necessary, and Hagrid was to help them gather mice and Merlin-knew-what-else out in the woods. Potter would assist with Parseltongue as necessary. “Oh joy,” Draco drawled.

They’d consulted Longbottom about the plant described in the poem, and he was fairly certain that it referred to the star-thorn, _Crataegus astrastella_ , which had a historical use as a medicinal plant but had been largely abandoned in favour of other ingredients which _didn’t_ scratch the skin to hell and back. There was a small patch by the school’s Thestral paddock and Longbottom was already on a mission to grow more—the seeds could be sprouted in a month soonest with all the fertiliser and speeding spells he could muster.

“And so I’m supposed to _weave cloth_ from these thorn things, which have a reputation for brutally scarring human flesh, and make… _snake clothes_ out of them?”

“That’s the long and short of it, yeah.”

Draco sat back against the wrought iron bars of the cot with a sigh that seemed to last an eternity. It was a good thing that he’d reluctantly agreed to McGonagall’s suggestion to have Chang help teach his classes. He wasn’t sure how much time he’d have to refine his second years’ pathetic _Petrificus Totalus_ technique if he was meant to become a bloody snake seamstress in the meantime.

“Fine,” he declared, chin up even though his voice was a bit watery. “Yes. It needs to be done, so I’ll do it.” He had been through worse, he told himself. He had survived getting sliced to bits by Potter, Easter hols with his insane aunt and a soulless mass murderer, and an honours degree program at Prospero College, Cambridge. Weaving seven snake coats out of death thorns would be a walk in the park.

Caleb let Draco process for a moment before quietly asking, “D’you want another cinnamon roll?”

“Merlin, _yes_.”

He heard the other man shuffling around in his canvas carryall as he said conversationally, “I had the house-elves bake these specially for you this morning, you know. I figured you could use a pick-me-up, and it’s beyond tragic that Brits don’t do these for breakfast. Now I know you’ve got a lot on your plate right now, but I was wondering…”

“Oh no.”

Caleb barrelled on bravely. “The charming Ms Chang is moving in to your old rooms as we speak. I thought that _maybe_ you could trade seats with me at dinner tonight so I could have the pleasure of getting to know her better? In exchange for both this scrumptious cinnamon roll—” he crinkled the parchment wrapping on the warm, fragrant pastry in a tantalising way, “— _and_ for me helping you with your wardrobe organisation project? What do you say?”

Draco narrowed his eyes at him. “I know this means nothing to you, but you are _such_ a Slytherin.”

“Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment.” Caleb handed over the cinnamon roll and laughed so hard at the expression on Draco’s face that Pomfrey immediately bustled over and banished him for the rest of the day.

* * *

After being released from the Hospital Wing, Draco haltingly made his way back to Potter’s rooms with the help of the pendant. “Bathroom. Alcove. Professor Flitwick’s office. Unicorn tapestry, circa 1548.” It was very slow going, and relied heavily on his mental map of the castle as well as pointers from the various students, ghosts, and portrait residents he passed on his way.

News of the curse had spread all over the school immediately, of course, and the denizens of Hogwarts reacted to it in wildly differing ways. Most of the younger students, third year and below, skirted around him in terrified silence as if the blindness was somehow catching, or as if they thought he’d turn them all to snakes if they made a peep. Draco could hear them all tiptoeing around him as he made his halting way up the stairs, hyper-aware of their squeaking shoes and rustling satchels and hushed whispers.

Some of the older students made a better effort. Lucas Faulkner, a sixth year Slytherin, quite literally ran into him coming around a corner on the third floor landing. After apologies and pleasantries were exchanged, Faulkner very kindly offered to walk him the rest of the way to the fourth floor tower where Potter lived. Draco was certain that the boy’s classmates would take the piss out of him for walking arm-in-arm with a teacher, so he decided to let Faulkner guide him by placing a hand on his shoulder instead.

“Pretty rough what happened to you, Professor,” Faulkner ventured, taking them up the stairs at a pace somewhere between snail-like and glacial.

“Quite.”

“Are you still gonna teach us? They’re not cancelling Defence, are they?”

Draco recalled his class schedule—the week away from teaching already seemed like an age—and realised that on this Thursday afternoon, Faulkner and the other sixth years were indeed meant to be in his Defence class, working on their Shield Charms. “Class will resume as usual on Monday; I believe the Headmistress will make an official announcement at dinner tonight,” he replied. “And I hope you’ve been practising your wandwork for the variants on _Protego_ , Faulkner. We’ll have an assistant instructor from the Ministry who will be acting as my eyes for the duration of this disrupted period, so she’ll be able to spot a droopy wrist even if I won’t.”

“Cool! I mean, um, not _cool_ , really—” Faulkner stuttered at Draco’s arched eyebrow. “I only mean, sir, it’s cool that there’s a way for you to continue class. It’s been kind of a boring week without it.”

That cheered Draco very slightly. “Kind of you to say so.”

“Well, not boring, really. Everyone’s excited for the Quidditch season to start. We’re going to trounce Hufflepuff next week. And in Professor Potter’s class, we’re learning about Muggle science, which is _awesome_. Did you know, sir, about these Muggle things called mang-nets? They’re, like, bits of metal that stick to one another. Anyway, Professor Potter was showing us…”

Draco let Faulkner’s words wash over him as they ascended the stairs, feeling the boy’s shoulder move as he gesticulated in excitement. Even if Muggle Studies hadn’t become a required part of the Hogwarts curriculum, he suspected that each and every student signed up for the course solely for the chance to spend more time with Potter. By all accounts, he was an exceptional teacher. In the early years, Draco grumpily convinced himself that Potter probably spent most of his class time regaling them with stories of defeating Dementors and riding dragons. But judging from the levels of enthusiasm that all the students showed for aeroplanes and batteries and photography (all completely foreign concepts to Draco), Potter was beloved for very legitimate reasons. It almost made Draco want to ask him how lightbulbs worked. Almost.

Faulkner kept up his stream of chatter all the way up until the fourth floor landing, where the cheerful voice of Cho Chang greeted them.

“Hi again, Draco.” Then, to Faulkner: “I can take him from here.”

“Oh, all right. See you next week, Professor Malfoy!” Draco released his hand from Faulkner’s shoulder and listened to his trainers disappearing down the hall, feeling rather like a package being handed from one courier to another.

“The Headmistress wanted me to touch base about your curriculum. Is now a good time?” Chang asked. She smelled of a light, springy, floral perfume—freesia, perhaps, or one of those other flowers that only existed in feminine soaps and fragrances.

Draco wondered if he would ever have a moment to himself again. Probably not. At his nod, Cho grasped him rather awkwardly by the bicep and steered him forward, an extremely odd sensation given that she was much shorter. At any rate, it was a short walk down the corridor, and he was gratified to discover that he’d at last been keyed in to the wards on Potter’s door. Draco detached himself after they stepped into the sitting room, wandering straight ahead towards his bedroom door. “Come in, come in,” he said with forced geniality. “I’d offer to make you a cup of tea, but…”

“Oh, I can manage that,” chirped Chang. “I bet Harry still has some of that peppermint kicking around.” She strode off and began to clatter about on the other side of the room.

An unpleasant twisting sensation gripped Draco’s gut, causing him to bump into the ottoman by the fireplace. _Of course_ Chang knew her way around Potter’s rooms, ex-lovers and great friends that they undoubtedly were. He envisioned them traipsing down here yesterday during the staff meeting, laughing about old times and exchanging blissful smiles as they bent over the snakes’ tank together. Potter would’ve complimented her admirable Legilimency technique and maybe placed a hand on her waist as she retrieved Pansy’s fractured memory. It was enough to make Draco feel ill.

Yet despite Draco begrudging her past with Potter and not quite knowing what to make of her briskly cheerful manner, it was clear that Chang was going to be an excellent co-instructor. She listened to Draco’s lesson plans attentively and asked intelligent, sharp questions about the students’ progress. She even insisted on taking care of the huge stacks of marking that had been sitting neglected in Draco’s briefcase, promising to have them done over the weekend.

“Oh, that reminds me,” she said, rustling about in her bag. “I brought you something.”

Draco lifted an eyebrow.

“It’s useful, you’ll like it! Here.” Chang slid something soft and fluffy and mostly flat across the table, tucking it under his fingertips. “It’s called a Dictaquill. We’re using them at the Ministry. It’s a vast improvement on the Quick-Quotes Quill, since it actually writes down the things you say. The activation spell is _Dicto_. Thought it’d be useful for you to write letters and things like that.”

Draco swallowed around a lump in his throat. It looked as if he was going to have to get a lot better at accepting help, and fast. Bloody Potter and his bloody upstanding friends and their bloody kindness.

“…Thanks,” he managed, even though it felt like ripping a fishhook up through his windpipe.

“Not at all.” Chang took one last slurp of her tea before standing. “Listen, I’ve gotta go, so I’ll see you around. But sometime, would it be okay if I poked around in your memories from Halloween? I have the stuff you extracted for McGonagall, but there might be something else useful knocking around back there.”

Were it anyone but a highly talented Ministry Legilimens who was helping him do his job, and were the situation anything but saving his best friends from certain doom, Draco would have slapped anyone who asked to ‘poke around’ in his memories. The situation being what it was, however, he gave a firm nod.

“Great! See you at dinner.” Chang gathered up her things and left him alone at the table, deep in thought.

* * *

When Draco went down to dinner that night, he realised it was the first time he’d set foot in the Great Hall for a meal since the accident. There was a slight stutter in the general chatter as he appeared in the archway closest to the staff table, before the noise resumed with a more frantic and conspiratorial air. Draco tried to appear calm and in control, which wasn’t helped very much when someone bumped into him from behind.

“Ah, Draco, my lad!” Slughorn said jovially, inadvertently nudging him with his considerable belly when Draco recovered his standing position. “I say, dashed unfortunate kettle of fish you’ve landed yourself in, eh? But good to see you on your feet again!” He chortled to himself and bustled away towards the table, leaving Draco with his mouth ajar at the man’s pompous, inappropriately jovial manner. He was just trying to think whether he’d be better off blindly casting a Tripping Jinx or a Stinging Hex when someone else opened the door behind him. He braced himself, ready to be knocked over again.

“Were you planning on standing there all night?”

Draco breathed a sigh of relief at Caleb’s American voice and the familiar scent of his cedar aftershave. _Oh thank Merlin_ , he thought, but what he said was: “It’s about time. Rather rude of you to keep me waiting.” He was so glad to be rescued that instead of gripping Caleb above the elbow as he’d been taught the previous day, Draco slid his hand around the other man’s arm, so that it looked less like he was being dragged around and more like they were just friends walking alongside one another. Caleb didn’t seem to object, as he reached over and gave Draco’s hand a reassuring squeeze.

“I could train some of the other staff on sighted guide,” Caleb offered in a murmur. “I’d hate to think of you getting stranded somewhere, waiting for me to rescue you.”

Well, if Draco wasn’t deathly afraid of that before, he sure as hell was now. He gave an undignified squeak. Caleb chuckled as he guided Draco’s hand to the back of a tall chair. Belatedly, Draco remembered that he’d agreed to switch spots. Which meant that he’d be sitting with—

“Hey, here are two excellent candidates. Harry, Luna, you’d learn how to do sighted guide to help Draco out, wouldn’t you?”

Draco and Potter spluttered in unison—Draco in outrage at being blindsided (literally. ha.) and Potter because, from the sound of it, he’d swallowed a gulp of water down the wrong pipe. Caleb began to administer a series of overly firm thumps to his back as Lovegood replied, “Oh, absolutely. I think that would be quite interesting to learn. Did you know that the Norwegian No-Eyed Narwhal uses a variant on sighted guide?” she asked Draco, who was trying to slide gracefully into his seat without knocking his knee on the table’s edge. “They bite onto the tails of sighted narwhals and swim behind them to their destination.”

“Fascinating.” 

“They mate for life,” Lovegood added.

Draco blinked. “And…?”

“And nothing. I just think it’s lovely.”

Draco was going to begin a list of nice things about being blind. Number one was that he didn’t have to endure Lovegood training her unnerving gaze upon him as she spouted bizarre animal facts. He was saved from having to reply by McGonagall tapping her water glass.

“A brief announcement before supper begins,” McGonagall said, with a _Sonorus_ carrying her voice across the Great Hall. “Professor Malfoy has been released from the Hospital Wing following the accident last week. Please give him a warm welcome back.”

Draco halfheartedly raised a hand at the smattering of applause following this pronouncement. He thought “accident” was a rather mild choice of words, but he had to admit that “discovery of an extremely Dark Object with the power to affect instantaneous and simultaneous human Transfiguration on seven very accomplished witches and wizards” would probably put the students in a bit of a panic.

McGonagall spoke again as the applause faded. “On a related note, we are pleased to welcome a guest who will be assisting Professor Malfoy in the classroom for the foreseeable future. I would like to introduce you all to Hogwarts alumna, and Senior Legilimens with the Ministry of Magic, Ms Cho Chang.”

There was another round of applause, particularly loud from the Ravenclaw table and on either side of him from Lovegood and Potter. Draco lowered his hands as McGonagall bid them _bon appetit_ and food appeared on the serving platters before them.

And ah, here was an unforeseen difficulty. All of Draco’s meals for the past week had either come on a Hospital Wing tray (eaten with shameless sloppiness and a liberal application of _Evanesco_ for the crumbs) or been placed directly into his hands: the cinnamon roll this morning, the lunch Caleb had served him yesterday, and the Cornish pasties from Potter which had ultimately wound up on the floor. Now Caleb was all the way at the other end of the staff table, doubtless entranced by Chang, and Draco was starving.

He was surprised, therefore, when he heard the sound of something being placed in front of him. “Scalloped potatoes at your 12 o’clock. Salmon at your 4. Carrots and green beans at 7. No, 8. Well, 7:30,” Potter babbled.

Draco gawked at him, or at least gawked at the bit of air to his left between Potter and himself. “I beg your pardon?”

“Thought you might want a plate of dinner?” Potter said, _scritch-scritch_ ing. “Er, and if you envision your plate as a clock, then the potatoes are…”

“Yes, _obviously_ , Potter,” snapped Draco, who was so impressed that Potter had thought of that clever little shorthand that he didn’t know what to do with all the reluctant appreciation welling up inside him. He felt as petulant as a child but he was unable to hold back his whinging. “Kindly don’t presume what I would like to eat. What if I didn’t want carrots?”

“But you always eat carrots.”

“That’s not the point!” Draco retorted, even as in the back of his mind he wondered how Potter knew that. “If I wanted help, I would ask for it.”

Potter sighed. “Sure, Malfoy. Sorry.” He sounded like he believed that just about as much as Draco meant it, which was to say not at all. He turned away and very pointedly began a conversation with Veronique Lefebvre, the new flying instructor, about the upcoming Quidditch match between France and Japan.

Draco was tempted to slump down in his seat and disappear under the table, or perhaps off the face of the earth, when Lovegood laid her small hand gently on his. He couldn’t help but startle, knocking a utensil to the floor as he did so. “Balinese Barbed Beetles communicate by shooting extremely sharp spikes at one another. It’s a very common way for them to bond with others in their horde,” she told him quietly.

“Do they also mate for life?” Draco snarked. 

“Of course.” Lovegood retrieved his fallen spoon before applying herself to her meal, and Draco decided to do the same. To his great irritation, he found Potter’s shorthand for the dinner plate extremely helpful. Using his fork to differentiate between the flaky texture of the salmon and the firmer one of the potatoes, he managed to eat the most substantial meal he’d had in several days. He only hoped that too much of it hadn’t wound up in his lap.

When the meal ended and everyone scooted their chairs back, preparing to leave the hall, Draco was surprised to hear Longbottom cough before addressing him. “Hey, Malfoy. We were just going out to the Forest to feed the Thestrals. Did you want to come along and gather some star-thorn?”

Draco had just been wondering what he was going to do all evening. He couldn’t say he was _eager_ to rub sharp spikes into his bare hands. But he thought of returning to his bedroom and moping on his bed, his friends watching him trapped in a glass box with their scaly bodies and beady little eyes, was just dreadful. “All right.”

“Excellent. You can walk with me, Draco,” Lovegood piped up from his other side. “I saw Caleb guiding you earlier. Would you like to take my arm?”

For someone who really didn’t touch other people all that often, Draco thought sourly that at this rate, he was going to become intimately familiar with the elbows of everyone in the castle by the time this ordeal was over. At least Lovegood had the decency to ask about guiding him, unlike Chang, who had forcibly steered him down the hallway.

“I’m perfectly capable of—”

He stood and immediately walked into the tall back of a chair that hadn’t been tucked back against the table. It was at the perfect height to bash the pendant painfully against his chest, where it intoned very helpfully: “Chair.”

“You don’t say.” Draco groaned and rubbed at his sore sternum. He reached out to steady himself on something stable nearby, which happened to be Lovegood’s arm, and let out a little resigned sigh. He supposed he could survive the walk down to the paddock as long as she didn’t start yammering on about Unseeing Urials or Stumbling Seahorses.

Although she was much shorter than Draco, Lovegood made an admirable first-time guide. She paused to warn him of doorways and stairs, and kept up a running narration of other tidbits that Draco might not have noticed even if he had the use of his eyes. (“There goes the Fat Friar above us; I think he’s off to visit that portrait of Prince Walter III on the sixth floor… Oh, look, someone’s left their glove on this bannister… There goes Nina Lang, the Gryffindor second year—good evening, Nina!—did you know she’s a nationally-ranked Gobstones player?”)

Draco found himself reluctantly appreciating the commentary. Lovegood’s tendency to dart from one interesting sight to another gave him a rather comprehensive idea of all the things he was missing without his vision, and spurred him on to get down to the paddock to begin work on his monumental task.

Yet instead of making their way down to the Entrance Hall, Lovegood steered them down a corridor. Draco was about to ask where they were when a door opened and he got his answer. The air became fragrant with the smells of cooking: seared meat, aromatic herbs, the deep sugary smell of sweets, and the tang of fresh fruit.

“Do you have everything we need?” Lovegood asked.

“Yup, the elves set aside some nice cuts for them earlier today. I’ll just _Leviosa_ mine. All right, Harry?”

Draco bit down an exclamation of surprise. He had distinctly heard Longbottom say ‘we’ when he described his plans to visit the Thestrals, but he hadn’t thought to ask who would be coming along. Apparently that included Lovegood and Potter—as well as himself. As they proceeded back down the corridor and down the Entrance Hall steps, he asked with a bit of a sneer, “Is this a regular thing the three of you do, then? Thestral picnics every Thursday?”

Lovegood hummed. “Thursdays are Hagrid’s night off, so I volunteered. I’ve always liked the Thestrals, you know. I find them quite gentle. When the herd grew a bit bigger last year, Neville and Harry stepped in to help me. Right, Harry?”

Potter must have nodded silently, because Lovegood resumed her narration about the Thestrals and their surroundings as they left the warmth of the castle and headed down the path towards the Forest. Draco clasped the neckline of his robes closely around his neck, wishing he’d thought to bring a scarf or gloves.

It rankled him like an insect bite, being unable to read the thousands of visual clues he knew he was missing during conversations. Nods, head shakes, smiles, shrugs, furtive winks and ticked-off scowls were all out of his reach. And Potter in particular employed these quite frequently, never having been a man of many words. No matter, Draco told himself. Sure, he had a tendency to keep his gaze on Potter probably ten times more than any of his other colleagues, so that he could tuck the memories of him grinning at a Quidditch match or turning the pages of a book or straightening his tie into the safe, secret spot in his heart that he reserved for such things. Draco would survive. And it was just that much more incentive to get this snakes-and-thorns business over and done with.

They finally drew to a halt in a clearing that smelled of hay and animal. Draco heard the soft snuffles and sighs of the lanky Thestrals, their heads high off the ground. He’d first seen them pulling the carriages for the older students when they returned for eighth year. Theo had been able to see them back in fifth, but it was a shock for the rest of the Slytherins—and doubtless the other students who’d been through the war. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t have a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings to associate with them, but Lovegood seemed right at home. She gently slid her arm out from Draco’s grip and gravitated towards the creatures.

“Hello, darlings. We’ve brought your supper. How are you, Leopold?”

_Leopold_ , Draco mouthed, nonplussed. His facial expression morphed into outright distaste as some truly alarming noises reached his ears. Heavy wet slaps and desperate chewing and tearing—it sounded as if the three of them were throwing raw meat to the carnivorous horse-like beasts. Draco hung back, certain that he would strike a Thestral (or worse, Potter) with a handful of bloody venison if he attempted to participate.

“We’ll be just a moment, Malfoy,” Longbottom called after lobbing a particularly squelchy handful into the paddock. “The star-thorn patch is just behind you. We’ll all go look at it together when we’re done.”

After having lost his footing several times on gnarled tree roots on the way here, as well as stepping into a wet spot of mud when Lovegood paused to pick a flower on the side of the path, Draco was quite ready to finish up and head back to his—well, Potter’s—warm, cosy rooms. There was really only so much horrible meat-throwing he could be expected to withstand. Quietly, he turned on his heel until the sounds of the Thestrals were directly behind him, then proceeded forward with caution.

His now-muddied Oxfords trod the transition from well-worn path to grassy hillock. Draco kept one hand on his pendant, tapping it carefully every now and then. It wasn’t the right tool for his needs, but it was surprisingly helpful at times. He angled the way he was facing until the pendant no longer told him, “Common pine tree, of the subfamily _Pinoideae_ ” and was able to avoid most of the obstacles that way.

After a few minutes, he again felt a change in the terrain underfoot, and heard quiet crunching beneath his shoes rather than springy grass. He leaned forward so that his face and the pendant were angled towards the ground, and gave it a tentative tap.

“Star-thorn, _Crataegus astrastella_ ,” the pendant informed him.

Eureka! He reached down slowly to grab a handfu—

”AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FUCKING FUCKING FUCK! _AHHHHHH!!!!_ ”

At first he wasn’t certain that the screams were coming from his mouth, but they paused as he drew a big, gulping breath. An absolutely excruciating pain was coursing up his arm through the skin of his palm where it had come into contact with the plant. The pain was extremely agonising, _just_ this side of lethal.

Draco sobbed and clutched at his wrist with his free hand, as if he could stop the suffering from spreading by squeezing hard, like a tourniquet. It did very little to reduce the stabbing sensation from its current level of ‘rusty knives peeling the skin from his hand, one strip at a time.’

Three sets of running footsteps signalled the approach of Potter, Lovegood, and Longbottom. “Draco! We were examining a Thestral with a twist in its ankle. What happened?” Lovegood asked, panting.

“What does it look like?” Draco spat through clenched jaws. “I found the thorns and I thought I would scoop some up while you were all busy at the petting zoo. But I—” He flexed his hand experimentally and his words twisted into a howling scream at the unbearable pain that lanced up his arm.

“Merlin. I did bring gloves, you know,” Longbottom said, sounding both exasperated and horrified. “You’re meant to handle star-thorn with nothing less than reinforced dragonhide.”

“Good to fucking know!”

He felt the three of them exchange a look over his head from where he was still crouched on the ground. Attempting to keep his breathing level, Draco concentrated all his effort on not moving his hand again.

“I should stay with the Thestral, try to splint its ankle,” Lovegood said.

“I’ll stick with you,” Longbottom said quickly. “You shouldn’t be out here alone by yourself. Harry, can you—?”

“Yeah.” Potter sounded about as enthusiastic as Draco felt. “C’mon, Malfoy. I’ll take you back to the castle.”

“No!” cried Draco, his voice adding insult to injury by breaking with a humiliating creak. “The thorns… I need to gather…”

“We’ll bring some back with us. You have another set of gloves, don’t you, Neville?” Lovegood asked. He did; so Draco and Potter were left to stumble home empty-handed while Lovegood and Longbottom tended to the Thestral.

Draco let out a long sigh through his nose and pursed his lips. Might as well get this over with. “All right then, Potter. Hold out your arm.”

“What?”

“To guide me? Because I won’t be _Mobilicorpus_ ed and I haven’t ridden piggyback since I was about three years old.” When Potter still didn’t respond (Draco had the feeling he was being stared at blankly), he snapped, “Merlin, weren’t you watching Caleb earlier?”

“I try to look at _Perez_ as little as I can,” Potter muttered.

Well, what the hell was _that_ supposed to mean? “As much as I would love to stand around arguing minutiae in the Forbidden Forest with you, Potter, I should probably get some salve on my hand before it falls off. Kindly give me your fucking arm.”

A rustle of fabric indicated that Potter had complied. Finally. Draco reached out and clamped his uninjured hand above the elbow, and the other man let out a sound like a kicked Crup.

“Yeeeek!”

“What?”

“It tickles!”

Draco was going to lose his goddamn mind over Potter, and not in the way he had always wanted to. “…It _tickles_ ,” he repeated flatly.

“Well, it does!” Potter had drawn his arm back protectively. “Lockhart Vanished my arm bones in second year, and they had to be Skele-Gro’d back. I’ve been ticklish around my elbow ever since.”

Merlin wept. Draco raised his good hand to his face and covered his useless eyes in an exaggerated gesture of vexation. Could he ride one of the Thestrals back to the castle? Pull a Potter ‘94 and _Accio_ a broom? No, he would just let the Aurors lead him back in enchanted handcuffs, because at this rate he was going to pound the Saviour of the Wizarding World to a bloody pulp.

“What would you suggest, then?” Draco envisioned Potter tying a string around his neck and leading him around like a baby Kneazle. Under other circumstances, it would have been quite the appealing image.

Potter shuffled, sounding as if he were shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Why don’t we just…” he trailed off as he took Draco’s left hand.

The dueling sensations of stinging torture in his right hand and the warm, firm grip of Potter clasping his left had the peculiar and immediate effect of robbing Draco entirely of coherent thought and speech. Somehow he managed a very small nod, and then he and Potter were walking through the woods hand-in-hand. A part of Draco’s stunned consciousness was now absolutely certain that this was a dream, but waking from it was now a much lower priority than before.

Potter cast a _Lumos_ and did a decent job of steering them around tree roots and other obstacles, and they managed to get back to the castle while exchanging minimal words. In addition to rendering Draco nearly speechless, holding Potter’s hand had the admirable effect of thoroughly distracting him from his injured palm. He drew closer to Potter as they carefully ascended the castle steps, and the crisp, fresh, apple-y scent of him made Draco a little lightheaded. He hung on to Potter’s hand like a lifeline.

Pomfrey made quick work of removing the star-thorns with an _Assulaufero_ , gave him an aloe and lavender balm for his hand, and sent them on their way. Back in Potter’s— _their_ rooms, they unclasped their hands and Draco lingered in his doorway, feeling rather detached from reality. There was a rustling of fabric as Potter divested himself of his cloak, and Draco caught a whiff of that sweet-sweat smell particular to someone who has just come in from the cold.

“‘Night, Malfoy. If there’s anything you need,” said Potter, for the second time that week, his voice gentle and unbearably kind, “just tell me.”

And oh, if Draco could summon the courage to tell Potter _everything_ he needed, what then? His heart was in his throat as he breathed in again, the scent of the herbal balm and sweat and the forest floating around them and making him lightheaded. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d spoken alone with Potter since they became colleagues three years ago, but it would take all the Arithmancers in the universe to count how often Potter had filled him with so much want and longing that he felt it might destroy him, that he might shatter and break trying to hold it all in.

Instead, he replied, “Good night, Potter,” and closed the door so that he could nurse his stinging palm and aching heart in silence.

* * *

True to her word, Lovegood had enlisted Longbottom’s help in harvesting a small basket of the star-thorns, which a house-elf delivered to Draco on Saturday morning after breakfast. There was also a pair of reinforced dragonhide gloves on loan from Longbottom, which—compared to the supple deerskin suede that he usually favoured—made Draco feel so ham-fisted that they might as well have been hams. He said as much to Caleb, waving his arms about for the way it made his colleague produce a deep, lovely laugh.

“It sure beats getting your hands scraped up, though, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so.” Draco pawed idly at the basket of thorns. They grew in long, thin tendrils which were covered in hundreds of star-shaped spines, each with countless small, prickly protrusions which seemed to have a taste for tender human flesh. Draco supposed he could see how one could weave them into something resembling cloth, but it certainly wouldn’t be a speedy process.

He was sitting at his small desk chair with both legs slung over the armrest, while Caleb went through his clothes to make them more easily identifiable. As Draco had suspected, the pendant identified both a gray-and-white striped poplin and a powder blue linen simply as “shirt,” no matter how irritably he tried to smack it into submission. Caleb was borrowing a shortcut of his sister Emily’s, which was to mark each item with a certain number of tactile notches to indicate the colour. One notch for black; two for white; three for blue, and so on. He was currently Transfiguring marks upon the buttons on Draco’s grey tweeds while explaining the notation system.

“I shall think of you whenever I unbutton my trousers,” Draco swore faithfully.

Which was, of course, when Potter walked in.

“Could you keep it down in here? I’m trying to do my marking.” His voice was taut and clipped, quite different from the dreamy way he’d sounded on Thursday night.

“Sorry, Harry. We’re just having too much fun over here,” laughed Caleb, not sounding sorry at all. “I could do your wardrobe next, if you want? Brown corduroys with that neon orange Cannons shirt is certainly a nice autumnal colour combo, but _I_ might go blind next if I have to look at you a moment longer.”

Despite his best effort, Draco gave a loud snort of laughter. There was a very cold silence before Potter replied, “No. Thanks.” Then, addressing Draco: “Malfoy, I don’t know how it works in your fancy Pureblood circles, but it’s sort of common courtesy to clear visitors with your housemates. Just for future reference.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Draco promised. In a stage whisper to Caleb, he added, “He’s just jealous.”

The door slammed as Potter withdrew.

“Of course he is,” Caleb laughed softly. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

“What?” Draco sat up in his chair, gloved arm clutching at the edge of his desk for balance. “No, not because of _me_ , you clod. It’s because you’ve been cosying up to his old girlfriend.”

Caleb hummed noncommittally. “I dunno. He’s got a certain set to his chiselled jawline, our Harry, when he’s cranky. I saw it on full display when you and I walked in to dinner last night.”

Draco thought back. Caleb had been entertaining him during their walk with a story about his third-year class, one of whom had sneezed while spellcasting and Transfigured her rubber duck into a balalaika instead of a bowling ball. Draco had laughed so hard that he’d nearly collapsed on their way to the staff table, clutching at Caleb with both hands to hold himself upright.

“…No,” he said slowly as his heart attempted a complicated gymnastic manoeuvre. “Perhaps he had indigestion.”

“Whatever you say, dude.” Caleb gave an amused little chuckle before continuing. “Okay, this teal vest. Do you want it marked three for blue, or five for green?”

“One, we call it a _waistcoat_ here; and two, green, _obviously_. Didn’t we just go through this? Teal is bluish green; turquoise is greenish blue.” Draco resumed his floppy seated position, willing his pulse to return to normal.

Potter had absented himself from the sitting room by the time they’d finished their wardrobe project, which was for the best as Chang came by to pick up Caleb for a walk to Hogsmeade. “See you on Monday morning, then,” Chang told him while Caleb gathered up his cloak and scarf. “Just shoot me a Patronus if you think of anything before then.”

“I can’t.”

The words tumbled from Draco’s lips before he could think twice about them, and a profound silence followed.

“What do you mean?” Caleb asked slowly.

“It’s just… I’ve never… I can’t cast a Patronus.” Draco swallowed around the lump in his throat, fidgeting absently with the heavy dragonhide gloves before yanking them off. “My mentor at uni tried to teach me, and _her_ mentor tried as well. I just can’t. They let me pass the course by doing an alternate research project on counter-jinxes instead.”

He sensed some highly frenetic nonverbal communication taking place between Chang and Caleb—likely lots of raised eyebrows, mouthing, and pointing. He bristled, feeling embarrassed and excluded, until Chang spoke.

“You really should learn how. It could come in handy if you find yourself stuck somewhere, and they’re dead useful for sending messages and stuff. If you like, I could set you up with the person who taught me? He’s a great teacher, and I’m sure you’d get along.”

Draco wrinkled his nose, but admitted that it was rather ridiculous for a thirty-year-old Defence professor to be incapable of producing a Patronus. Besides, the sooner he learned, the sooner everyone would stop bothering him about it.

“Very well,” he replied. “Next weekend, perhaps?”

And he could have sworn there was more than a hint of mischief in Chang’s voice when she replied: “It’s a date.”


	3. ready to suffer, ready to hope

Chang had the fourth years wrapped around her little finger within about three seconds of starting class on Monday morning, which was excellent, as those particular students were rather fixated on Draco’s personal life. Especially the parts which concerned Potter. They tended to derail class by asking him questions about the short-lived Duelling Club in Draco's second year, or the ill-fated Triwizard Tournament, or specific Quidditch games in which Potter (well, Gryffindor) had won by the highest margin in recorded history or whatever. The worst part was that they were all very dedicated and efficient students as well, so no matter how much homework Draco assigned them, they always completed their assignments with enough spare time to ask him about his childhood with the Chosen One.

They were enthralled by Chang, though, and with good reason. At the stroke of 9, she strode over to the lectern and said in her usual chipper voice: “Good morning. Let’s talk about counter-curses. What can you tell me about them?”

Draco was sitting with his legs crossed on a high stool beside her, and smirked. He had asked the fourth years to read the chapter on counter-curses the day before Halloween, which was now ten days ago. He wondered how many of them had actually done the reading, and how much of it they remembered.

“Uh,” ventured one student. “Well, historically, they began with symbols and physical objects, right? Like, in the olden days. They’d use mirrors and salt and talismans to ‘deflect dark energy’.” This last was uttered in a mocking tone, and a ripple of laughter echoed through the classroom.

“Right. Not very useful when you’re in a duel or bleeding out, though, is it?” Chang asked. “So how did that evolve into the counter-curses that are used today?”

Another student piped up. “Wixen began to realise that it wasn’t enough to try and reflect or undo a curse. Like, um… It’s like when you bake a cake, right? You can’t _un_ -bake it. The flour and eggs and milk and whatever are fundamentally changed. And in the same way, it’s impossible for many curses to just do the reverse of the wand movement and expect everything to go back to normal.”

“That is an _excellent_ analogy, Miss Ormseth,” said Draco, who had recognised the student’s voice and identified her in his mental roster. “Five points to Hufflepuff.” He heard a soft, awed murmur at his blind recognition. Children really were so easy to impress. “What, then, is the theory behind a modern counter-curse?”

“It’s got to do with restoring the victim back to their original state,” someone said. Draco thought for a second before settling on a name: Dominic Vaughan, a Ravenclaw. “For example, the counter-curse for _Petrificus Totalus_ isn’t un-paralysing the victim. You have to cast it with the intent of granting the person control of their own movements again. Counter-curses are powered by creative, restorative energy—not just the desire to undo something bad.”

“Precisely! Which brings us to our next order of business. Clear your desks to the side, please.” Amid the scraping and hubbub, Chang must have Summoned the practice mats from their shelf at the back of the room, because Draco heard them flop softly onto the floor. “How do you usually divide them up?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “By house or by surname if I’m feeling boring. By the marks on their last essays if I’m feeling extra Slytherin.”

“Ooh, that’s harsh,” said Chang, but he could tell she was grinning.

They spent the rest of that class with half the students (surnames A through L) paralysed on the soft mats, and the other half (M through Z) performing the counter-curse. Ormseth and Vaughan had no trouble with theirs, although Draco and Chang went around the classroom helping those who did. Draco stood beside a particularly frustrated Sophia Terzic and reminded her that she really had to wish her partner to become ambulatory once again.

“Who are you casting on, anyway?” Draco asked, as he didn’t feel like hearing the pendant’s annoyingly calm voice at the moment.

Terzic grumbled.

“Come again?”

“…It’s Ian Fidler.”

“Ah. Switch with the person next to you, then.” Draco recalled that Terzic and Fidler had a rather heated feud, as they were rival Chasers on Gryffindor’s and Slytherin’s respective Quidditch teams. Sure enough, as soon as Terzic performed the counter-curse on one of her housemates, it worked splendidly. Draco rolled his eyes, or tried to at least. Some things never changed.

When class ended, Chang said she would clear the mats and reset the desks while Draco went up to the Hospital Wing for some more salve. He was surprised at how much the herbal mixture soothed the lingering stinging sensation in his palm, and had used up the small tin from Pomfrey in a matter of days. Terzic offered him her shoulder, as she was on her way to visit a friend with a bad case of Mumblemumps. She was so short that Draco almost had to extend his arm fully to reach down to her shoulder, which made him think of how nice it had been to hold Potter’s hand, which made him stumble across several entryways and nearly knock over a bust of a cranky ogre on the second floor.

Terzic had led him to Pomfrey and he was sitting in the corridor outside, trying to unscrew the tin, when the familiar scent of cedar floated towards him. “You’re not skiving off class, are you?” Draco asked with a smile, and was delighted when Caleb responded.

“Just dropping off a second year who managed to Transfigure his left shoe into a block of ice. Hoping he doesn’t have frostbite.” Caleb plopped down companionably on the cushioned seat next to Draco, sitting so close that their legs brushed together. “Can I help you with that?”

Draco handed over the tin, and Caleb popped it open with ease. “May I?” And when Draco nodded, he scooped out some of the herbal balm and began to massage it into his aching hand muscles with broad, strong swipes of his thumbs. The alarmingly pleased-sounding groan this drew from Draco’s throat resounded around their cosy windowed alcove.

Caleb hummed and pressed his fingers into Draco’s palm. “Did you make much progress on your weaving this weekend, then?”

“Not really,” Draco admitted. He had tried weaving the stringy thorns freehand, laying out horizontal lines and then twining vertical ones over, under, over, under. He envisioned the rustic woven rugs that decorated his mother’s flat in Norway, thick threads in greys and blacks. Unfortunately, it was very tricky to weave strings without a loom or other support structure, and with the additional challenges of:  
(1) the multitude of thorns;  
(2) the unwieldy dragonhide gloves, and  
(3) his complete inability to see,  
the task was impossible. In the end, he’d got so frustrated that he’d torn off the gloves before shoving the tangled vines back into their basket barehanded, leading to a fresh round of agony.

He was just getting to the part where he’d had to cast _Assulaufero_ lefthanded to remove the star-thorns from his ravaged skin, when Caleb rubbed a bit of salve into a particularly painful spot near his thumb. “ _Salazar_ that’s good,” he groaned, tipping his head back so that he was leaning against the wall.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Potter.

Draco sat up abruptly, although Caleb didn’t let go of his hand. “Hello, Harry,” he said placidly.

“Perez,” said Potter pointedly. “Look, Malfoy, can I have a word?”

“Well, that’s my cue.” Caleb sounded amused as he finally untangled his fingers from Draco’s and placed the tin of salve in his pleasantly throbbing palm. “Good luck, champ,” he announced, knocking his knee against Draco’s in a friendly way before standing and heading down the corridor in long, loping strides.

Draco listened to him go and flexed his freshly-massaged hand. “Well?”

Potter shifted from side to side. For someone who didn’t talk much, he managed to move _so_ loudly. “‘Well’ what?”

“You’re the one who tracked me down.”

“Yeah, only to find you with Perez in a corridor where anyone could see, getting a bloody hand job!”

Draco dropped the tin. Distantly, he heard it rolling away along the stone floor as his brain struggled to recover from whiplash. “I’m— I’m fairly certain that’s _not_ what ‘hand job’ means, Potter. Caleb was just helping me open the tin. The lid was stuck.”

“Whatever.” Potter’s voice faded as he plodded away to retrieve the balm, and he smacked it down crankily on the cushion next to where Draco was sitting. “Why do you call him ‘Caleb’, anyway?”

Draco patted around for the salve and tucked it into his robe for safekeeping. He was still a bit stunned, his mind repeatedly echoing Potter saying ‘hand job’ as if he’d shouted it down a bottomless well. “It’s his name. He asked me to call him Caleb when we first met, so I did.”

“But you still call Luna ‘Lovegood,’ and Neville ‘Longbottom.’ And me ‘Potter.’” It sounded like he was scuffing at the floor with the toe of one of his worn trainers.

“I can’t help it if I’m a man of habit,” Draco retorted. “Look, _Potter_ , did you really come up here just to discuss the finer points of collegial nomenclature?”

Potter cleared his throat. “Actually, I came up here to ask if you wanted a loom.”

Draco gaped at him.

“Well, Ron and Hermione and I were talking about the curse this weekend—”

“Of course you were.”

“—and Ron asked his mum, and it turns out that her great-great-great-grandmother did all kinds of crafts, and she’s got her old loom up in the attic at The Burrow. Arthur offered to tune it up and bring it over for you to use. I just got the owl, and I told them I’d ask you.”

Draco would have given a great deal to tell his 16-year-old self, _Don’t worry, it gets better. Potter and his side win the war. You graduate at the top of your class in Cambridge and land the Defence job at Hogwarts. Then you end up rooming with Potter and he fetches you crafting machines when all your friends get cursed. It’s altogether a much better time than bleeding out on the floor of a girls’ toilet._

In for a Knut, he supposed. “I mean, sure? It couldn’t hurt.”

“Brilliant.” Fleetingly, Draco allowed himself to envision the grin Potter always wore when he said _brilliant_ like that—dark brows lifted, eyes bright, mouth quirking into a lopsided upward curve. If he was lucky, maybe Potter’s fists were jammed into the pockets of the hooded Muggle garment he liked to wear beneath his professor’s robes; or perhaps those of his jeans, worn threadbare at the knees in a way that should have been deplorable but which Draco nonetheless found wildly attractive. How cruelly ironic, that the circumstances which led Potter to cohabitate with him and help him and smile at him would also render him completely unable to see these miracles taking place.

“Ah, shit, I’m gonna be late for class,” Potter exclaimed. “I’ve gotta run. Do you need—? Should I—?”

Merlin, Potter was almost as bad offering help as Draco was at accepting it. “I have no wish to hurtle about the castle with you dragging me along,” he said honestly, although he hadn’t forgotten how warm and lovely Potter’s hand had felt as recently as the walk to breakfast this morning. “Go to your class; I’ll be fine. I’d like to get more accustomed to finding my way around on my own, anyway.”

“If you’re sure. Catch you later, then.” A swish of cloak and squeak, squeak, squeak as Potter’s trainers clipped down the hall.

Draco lingered in the alcove, savouring the late autumn sunlight that fell on his back and the accompanying warmth in his heart that had nothing whatsoever to do with the weather.

* * *

He was in the bath that night, carefully sniffing two bottles to determine which was his tea tree body scrub versus his eucalyptus-mint face wash, when there was a tremendous crash nearby.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Hogwarts had produced a bizarre and deafeningly loud noise. It was a magical building, after all, and sentient in its own way. For all Draco knew, it had just produced a new wing for an indoor Herbology lab, or tacked on an extra couple of inches to the Great Hall just for fun.

Then the noise came again, this time with even louder creaking and scraping, and it was apparent that it was happening right outside his door. Abandoning the bottles, Draco climbed out of the bath, grappled around in thin air until he found the silk dressing gown hanging on the back of the door, and slipped into it as he stormed across his bedroom.

“Potter!” he bellowed as he threw open the door. “What in Merlin’s name is going on out there?!”

“Hi, Malfoy,” chorused no fewer than three voices, with an additional several chiming in “Hello”s afterwards. He straightened his spine and kept a brave expression on his face as he carefully tightened the tie on his gown.

Potter had the presence of mind to clue him in on their guests, “It’s me, Hermione, Ron, and his parents. And, er, Charlie and Bill.”

“We just thought we’d bring the loom over now, seeing as we were all gathered for dinner anyway,” said one of the Weasley men, giving something solid and wooden a hard _smack_.

“Good thing, too. Turns out it’s much bigger than I remember!” another one chuckled. “Thank Merlin for Shrinking Charms, eh?”

“Good evening,” Draco managed, rapidly coming to terms with the fact that he had bathwater pooling at his feet. “Let me just—”

“Take your time, dear.” That soothing voice could only belong to the gingers’ matron. And as he spun around to get dressed, she added in a loud whisper, “Poor love, he’s nothing but skin and bone! Ron, dear, would you nip back for a plate of ham, maybe some apple pie—”

Draco shut the door and scrambled about his dresser and wardrobe, undoing much of Caleb’s careful organising work as he tried to pick out an outfit appropriate for the Golden Trio and (arguably) the two fittest Weasley brothers. In the heat of the moment, he couldn’t recall the blasted notch system, so he simply hoped that everything was buttoned and zipped before he reentered the sitting room. He was aware that his cheeks must be rosy from the warm bath, and that he hadn’t had time to apply any Sleakeazy’s to keep his hair from curling around his ears, but it couldn’t be helped.

The visitors were clustered outside his bedroom door to the right, and were producing some terribly noisy thuds and clunks. They were all talking over each other as well.

(“Dad, this crosspiece should fit right where you’re—”

“Now where did we put that beam before—”

“—just pass me that handle, would you, Bill?”)

“I say,” said Draco faintly.

“Yeah,” came Potter’s voice, apologetic but smiling, from his left. “I thought it would be a lot more… lap-sized. I think I was remembering one from when I took Teddy to the toy shop this summer. It was just like, a picture frame with strings. This one looks like a cross between a wooden golf cart and a piano.”

That surprised a laugh out of Draco, which had the effect of casting a pall of silence over the room. Thankfully, before Draco could overanalyse the reasons why this particular group of people would be startled by his laughter, the Floo roared to life and the youngest Weasley brother strode over.

“Here you go, Malfoy. Brown sugar glazed ham, roasted potatoes and parsnips, and a bit of apple pie.” He hefted a basket weighing approximately six tons into Draco’s hands. The _but I’ve already eaten_ somehow morphed into a “Much obliged,” on its way out of Draco’s mouth.

Weasley laughed. “Nah, mate. Pleasure’s all mine. We’ve got a pool in the DMLE for Weird Photo of the Week, and Dennis always wins. My mum teaching you how to weave cloth, though, is gonna go down in history.”

Draco blanched and Granger went “Ronald!” as Mrs Weasley chided, “There will be no photography at all, please and thank you. Now off you go, all of you. I’m sure Luna and Neville and Minerva and Hagrid would love to see you.” She made a series of shooing noises until several sets of footfalls receded and the door closed firmly. “Now Draco, dear—why don’t I put your supper under a Stasis Charm just over here? And then come and sit on the bench and I’ll show you how it’s done. I’ve brought some spare yarn we can practice with…” Draco felt as if he were standing in the path of a rapidly moving train, and figured it would be best to just go along for the ride.

The next hour or two passed in a blur of warp and weft, ratchet and roller. She showed him how to set up the structure with vertical lines of thin string; wind the thick yarn around a little wooden piece called a shuttle; and pass the shuttle back and forth, over and under the vertical lines. There was a bit called a heddle which lifted the vertical lines up and down so that he didn’t have to nose the tip of the shuttle across and risk skipping one. And there were countless parts and functions which Draco couldn’t recall the names of, but which he learned by feel. His shoulders ached from hunching over the work surface and the wool yarn was scratchy against his skin, though not a fraction as bad as the thorns. But at last, they had created a few inches of something that looked and felt like cloth.

Draco was running his fingertips over the tiny bit of coarse woven material at the nearest part of the loom with a tiny seed of accomplishment in his chest. Mrs Weasley reached over and touched his hand. It was gentle, although the contact still made him jump slightly.

“I can’t imagine how difficult this must be for you,” she said softly.

His hands stilled on the little scrap of cloth as Mrs Weasley shifted on the bench beside him. She sniffled and blew her nose, and Draco realised with a jolt of horror that she was crying.

“Um.”

“You’ve been through… we’ve all been through so much. Especially Harry. And I just wish you didn’t have this awful curse standing in the way of… Oh, it’s so dreadful!”

 _You landed the death blow on my demented aunt_ , Draco thought wildly, but what came out was: “Um?”

“Harry’s a good boy. And so are you.” She patted him on the shoulder. “He told me, you see.”

“Told you what?” Draco croaked.

But at that moment, the cavalry reappeared, and the sounds of excited chatter filled the sitting room. The Weasley brothers immediately began to tell their mother about their visit, massive blocks of Hagrid’s fudge were handed around, and someone pressed a cup of tea into Draco’s hands. After what seemed like an age, they all exclaimed at the late hour and piled back into the Floo, and Draco was amazed but not shocked to receive a rather warm and sniffly hug from Mrs Weasley before she departed.

“…Good _grief_ ,” he huffed, collapsing into the wingback by the hearth and hearing Potter do the same close by. “Is this what it was like to be a Gryffindor? People bringing you twelve suppers and teaching you how to make cloth and being all helpful and kind?”

“Pretty much,” Potter yawned. “So Molly showed you everything you need to know, huh?”

“I can confidently say that I am the castle’s new resident expert on curse-related textiles. I’ll probably give it a go with the thorns this week, when I can find the time. I know we’ve got another war council with McGonagall on Wednesday. _Merlin._ ” He scrubbed his hands over his face as the enormity of the situation seemed to settle squarely on his shoulders.

“What kind of curse requires so much arts and crafts to break, anyway?” Potter asked drowsily.

“Oh, you’d be surprised.” Draco squirmed around in the chair, found a plush blanket draped over the back, and wrapped it around himself. Somehow, his exhaustion made it easier to talk to Potter. Either that, or the Gryffindor-itis was truly contagious. “I had this book of Muggle fairy tales when I was young. I made my mother and Dobby read it to me on the nights when my father wasn’t around. It had Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast.

“My favourite one was called ‘Elisa and the Swans.’ It’s the usual guff about an evil stepmother who wants to inherit the kingdom, so she curses Elisa’s six brothers and they’re transformed into swans.

“The fairy queen says Elisa can transform them back by sewing them shirts out of nettles. And she can’t speak a word or else the spell will never be broken. So she spends ages making these shirts, and even though she can’t talk, this prince falls in love with her.”

Draco trailed off to give a huge, bone-stretching yawn, vaguely aware that Potter had fallen completely silent. “Anyway, she gets accused of witchcraft by—I think it’s the bishop? the prince’s advisor, maybe?—and they’re about to burn her at the stake. And her brothers fly in from the lake to try and save her. And as Elisa’s about to be burned alive, in one last desperate act, she throws the shirts into the sky. The swans fly into them in midair and return to their human forms, and Elisa marries the prince, and they live happily ever after.”

For a long moment, there was no sound but that of the fire crackling in the hearth. At length, Potter said, “…Malfoy, why on earth did you have a book of Muggle fairy tales?”

“It was from Aunt Andromeda, of course. And I’m quite positive it’s still in my bedroom at the Manor. Though who knows, now it’s been seized for r- r- repa- reparations.” Draco gave himself over to another enormous yawn, then slouched more deeply into the cosy chair. “I always liked that story. No hero to ride in and rescue her. Elisa saves her brothers all by herself.”

His eyelids, fluttering and drooping before, now felt heavier than those Hagrid-sized blocks of fudge. As his breaths grew deeper and the sound of the fireplace faded, Draco dimly registered the sensation of another blanket being draped over him, and something lighter than a dustmote brushing against his temple.

* * *

Draco’s mood at that Wednesday’s War Council was severely dampened by the meal served for their working lunch. Someone—Draco suspected Granger—must have gifted the Hogwarts house-elves a cookbook on international cuisine. The meals this term had taken a turn from the usual rotation of steak-and-kidney, shepherd’s pie, and bangers and mash. All of a sudden they were being served spicy stir fries, elaborately sauced pastas, something called chicken tikka masala which he reluctantly adored, and once—to his horror—pizza. The students were thrilled, obviously, and he strongly suspected that Caleb was going to coerce the elves into cooking some sort of turkey and cranberry monstrosity for an American holiday taking place in late November.

For the moment, though, he was preoccupied with trying to assemble something called a _yee-ro_ into a piece of bread that was apparently shaped like a pocket. Caleb and Chang were giggling on the other side of the room, entirely distracted by one another, and Potter was doing a terrible job explaining.

“You’re meant to spread the tzatziki in first. That’s— no, to your left— yeah, just a spoonful… Yup, now you put in some lettuce and tomato…”

“Where are the tongs?”

“There aren’t any, just use your hands.”

“I am not manhandling vegetables for the sake of the house-elves’ multicultural culinary pursuits,” Draco grumbled.

“Don’t be a knob, Malfoy. Everyone loves gyros. Or there’s falafel if you want chickpeas instead.”

Draco slammed his plate down on the sideboard with a rattle. “I can’t understand half the words you’re saying! How am I supposed to know whether or not I want to eat a _flauffle_ when I can’t even see what they are?” he hissed. “I refuse to eat these strange foods! Just… why can’t things be easy?”

And with that childish snipe, he stormed off. This was made only slightly difficult by his lack of vision, but Draco knew the staffroom well enough that he only bumped into two side tables until he found his favourite chair and sat down with a huff. He was fuming and his stomach was growling at the admittedly tempting scents coming from the lunch spread, but he just couldn’t summon the energy to shovel peculiar vegetables around with his bare hands.

The small group of staff and Granger took their seats, and McGonagall called the meeting to order. She enquired after his friends’ wellbeing, and Draco sat with his arms folded while Lovegood gave her report. Apparently, Greg was beginning to shed his skin and she was very much looking forward to showing the result to her second year class.

“Hey,” said Potter from his left, sliding something along the table towards him. “I found you a bowl and just got you a little bit of everything. Here’s a fork.”

Draco was too hungry and wound up to stay grumpy at him, and danced his fingertips across the table surface until he found the bowl. “We’ll make a proper sighted guide of you yet, Potter,” he muttered.

To his combined shock and delight, Potter responded by nudging his foot under the table. Draco fought down a blush and busied himself by spearing several tidbits onto the fork. He ended up with some flavourful grilled meat, tomato, and a corner of bread smeared with the yoghurt sauce, and had to admit that it was vastly preferable to sitting there in sulky, starving silence.

Just as McGonagall was asking Granger for an update on the figurine, the staffroom door banged open. “Terribly sorry to interrupt!” Slughorn said in his usual jovial way. “Just thought I’d left my pewter stirring rod here! Rather hard to make a proper Confusing Concoction without one, you know.” He chuckled to himself and began to walk about the room searching for it, and bumping the back of Draco’s chair.

“Um, as I was saying…” Granger continued, clearly nonplussed but still unwilling to have a dispute with a teacher after all these years, “I have a colleague in the Department of Mysteries who offered to examine the figurine. She offered to run some additional tests—”

“Merlin’s beard!” came Slughorn’s voice again, loud with surprise. Draco wished he would find his pewter rod and stick it someplace unpleasant.

“What is it, Horace?” McGonagall asked, sounding peeved at the second interruption.

“Well, I mean to say… That isn’t a _Serpens Obumbratio_ , is it?”

They all whirled around to look at him. (Draco just whirled.)

“Would you elaborate on that?” Caleb asked faintly.

“Gladly, my boy!” There was a splintery creak as Slughorn settled into a free chair. Draco envisioned him resting his clasped hands over his belly, in the way he did when he was getting ready to give a lengthy lecture. “They were used in the eleventh or perhaps twelfth century, mostly in rural Silesian farming villages. There’s a local legend there, you see, that the appearance of snakes indicates blessed farmland. All complete balderdash of course, but you know how these funny legends can take root.” He paused, chuckling.

“In any case, the witches in the 1100s were frantically desperate to give positive results to farmers who came to them, begging for fertile soil. And since there were practically no serpents to speak of in that region, one enterprising witch came up with this little fellow. _Serpens Obumbratio_. Terribly Dark magic. It transformed everyone in the witch’s clan into snakes, with the unfortunate side effect of rendering the leader of the clan completely blind.”

A shocked silence descended upon the room. “Horace, how in Circe’s name do you know this?” McGonagall managed at last.

“A classmate of mine did a research project on it when I was a student!” Slughorn replied cheerfully. “Jena… Jelinek? Jiracek? Something of the sort. Yes, a special history assignment for Binns. Her family was from Silesia and she had a little _Serpens_ figurine just like that, which had been passed down from one generation to another! She even brought it in to show our class. Ah, but then her sister caught an unfortunate case of Dragon Pox and the family moved; transferred the girls to Durmstrang.”

“Professor…” Granger asked slowly. “Is there any chance that Jena would have left the _Serpens_ in the Restricted Section of the library?”

“Certainly, my dear, certainly! She had a special dispensation from Binns to do research there.”

Lovegood hummed. “So Mr Filch might have been right after all, when he told us where he found the figurine.”

“It certainly sounds plausible,” mused Chang. “Now suppose—”

“Pardon me,” interrupted Draco, who thought that Wednesdays might be his new least favourite day of the week. “Would you go back to what you were saying about the effects of the _Serpens_? Why in Salazar’s name would _I_ be blinded?”

“Because the _Serpens_ considered you the leader of your… clan, I suppose!” Slughorn’s amused chuckle grated at Draco’s nerves. “But that’s all addressed in the little poem, isn’t it? The second stanza, I believe?” When silence rang around the table again, Slughorn barrelled on, “Yes, Jena brought in the poem associated with the snake curse and staged a dramatic reading for us. I am almost certain that it was three stanzas. There was something to do with the dawn… or was it a moon?”

Draco blanched and turned to Potter. “Are you sure about your translation?” he asked hoarsely. “I don’t remember anything about dawns or moons.”

“Positive,” Potter assured him. “The memory that Cho showed me only had two stanzas.”

“Then there must be a third. Didn’t you say there was some bit in the middle that you couldn’t make out?”

“No, I don’t—” Chang began. “Unless it’s buried even deeper than…? Oh my god. Maybe I can try…” There was a clatter as she stood abruptly. “Draco, could I borrow Pansy for a few days?”

“By all means.” Whatever possessiveness Draco had felt last week was steadily evaporating at the thought of more clues to uncover.

It was decided, then. Chang would act as Pansy’s caretaker for a few days, with Lovegood’s help, while she took a deeper look at her memories for the missing stanza to the poem. Granger decided that Slughorn’s firsthand knowledge of the figurine was better than anything the Unspeakables could tell her, and they fell into a conversation about artefacts and imbued spells which Draco could only half-follow.

“Guess we’ve got our work cut out for us, then,” Potter murmured beside him.

“Fat lot of work _you_ have to do. Translating poems into a language you magically learned when you were possessed.” Draco dropped his head into his arms and groaned.

“It’s one of my favourite things about myself,” Potter deadpanned. “Want another gyro bowl?”

Draco spoke into the hollow of his bent elbows against the table. “Please. And lots of that yoghurt sauce.”

He sensed Potter grinning as he got up to leave. With a thrill, Draco realised their feet had been pressed together for the entire meeting. And he felt the absence of Potter’s touch like a starving man given the tiniest scrap from an enormous and succulent feast.

Since he already had his head buried, Draco allowed himself the luxury of a loud, miserable groan.

* * *

As anyone might have guessed, working the loom with the star-thorns was about a billion times worse than the wool yarn had been. The thin vines had dried out since being picked, and had gone from supple to brittle in a way that made them very difficult to handle. He kept snapping them in his clumsy, gloved hands. And he was certain that even if he wasn’t getting thorns embedded in his palms, the little bastards were clinging to his clothes in a way that would be very unpleasant to discover later. But he took deep breaths as he passed the shuttle back and forth, gingerly touching the woven material every now and then to check his progress.

“I swear,” he said, half to himself and half to Blaise, whom he had draped around his shoulders for company, “if it turns out I could’ve got away with making little hats instead, or belts… They’re both _garb_ , you know. Never heard of anything so ridiculous as a snake wearing a coat.”

_Hiss._

“Well, bully for you.” Draco was no Parselmouth, but he had listened to Blaise’s clever retorts in a shared dormitory for eight years. “When you’re Transfigured back, we’ll all go on a shopping spree. Armani suits for all. You owe me a birthday present, anyway.”

_Hissssss!_

Draco couldn’t help but smile. The whole situation was patently ridiculous: weaving sackcloth for serpents, while babbling to them about coats and suits. He was just glad the snakes were talking back. Otherwise he _really_ would’ve been worried.

When the dregs of his tea had gone cold, and then from cold to frigid, he trailed his gloved fingertips over the cloth and found that he’d made a piece of material about two feet long and three inches wide. He gave a pleased hum, then carefully removed his work from the loom. “There we are, then. What do you think?”

He felt the lean line of muscle shift along his neck and shoulders as Blaise moved to examine the scrap of fabric. _Hiss._

“Well, it’s not for you, is it? It’s Astoria’s. Ladies first and all that.”

_Hiss._

“I think it’s a triumph, honestly. I can add this to my CV. Honours at Cambridge; Defence Against the Dark Arts apprenticeship with Serafina Julien; and mastery of cloth-related counter-curses.”

He placed the bit of cloth on the top of the loom for safekeeping before gently lowering Blaise back into the tank. Then he shucked his sweat-and-thorn-covered clothing upon the bedroom floor as he ran himself a bath. Humming, he threw the heavy dragonhide gloves down, and flung the pendant alongside it. At this point, he could almost move about the room without needing to trail his hand along the walls and furniture. His mood was positively triumphant as he settled into the warm vanilla-scented water, and trailed both hands down the length of his body.

If he was counting the days correctly, it had been nearly two weeks since his last wank, which was so absurd it was unacceptable. Little wonder he had been a tense, snappish, nervous wreck since the curse. He just needed to let off some steam.

He let his mind drift to the thought of Potter leading him down the forest path in the dark, their hands clasped and warm breath huffing into the cold night. It was the work of a moment to dip back into that memory, and instead of heading back to the castle, Potter said _C’mere_ and shoved him against a tree and slanted their mouths together, hot and needy and incredible.

But instead of a tree it was a classroom, and even though he was shorter, Potter managed to pin Draco’s wrists above his head. And he shifted to bite greedily at Draco’s jaw, his neck, while his other hand crept up to untuck Draco’s shirt, to slide against the soft skin over his ribs. Draco moved his own fingers there and gripped tighter with his other hand.

But instead of a classroom it was a bed—his bed, Potter’s bed, a king-sized monstrosity in some hotel somewhere, fucking _anywhere_ —and Potter was leaving bruises where he clutched at Draco’s thigh and rubbing his cheek raw with stubble burn. _Potter_ , he cried, writhing upwards in search of friction, ankles locked behind Potter’s waist and trapping him in place. _Oh, Potter._

Draco’s left hand fumbled, seeking to grab the edge of the tub but instead finding something square and slippery and— _Merlin and Morgana_ , it was Potter’s soap. He breathed in the fresh aroma of apples, wondering just when the smell of a fucking fruit had become so devastating to him. He gulped, desperate, and sank his teeth into his bottom lip as he imagined Potter running the bar down his neck, his chest, between his legs…!

As his whole body tensed and bowed, he gave a wordless, strangled scream that bounced around the corners of the tiled room with alarming intensity, echoing back to him in waves. Catching his breath in great heaving gasps, he slumped down, only vaguely aware that he was still clutching the bar of soap. His fingers wouldn’t respond to repeated weak pleas to release the thing. Instead, Draco held it against himself, right over his heart, which was pounding so hard it must have sent ripples through the bathwater.

Boneless in the way he always felt after a long overdue release, Draco contemplated falling asleep in the bath when a voice interrupted his thoughts from not too far away.

“Malfoy?”

“Hmm?” he called, lazy and languid and sated. Until he realised that the voice was totally unmuffled by the barrier of a door, and about three octaves higher than usual.

Oh.

Potter sounded slightly strangled. “I’m just gonna, er. Close the door, if that’s okay? And then I think I’ll head down to the kitchens for a bit. Or maybe take a walk. A really long walk. Er… just shut the door in future, would you?”

“Certainly,” Draco responded, mortification warring with pleasure within him.

To his credit, he waited until the front door closed before dipping his hands under the water again. He cast his own extra-strength _Muffliato_ , plus _Colloportus_ at both the door leading to his bedroom and the one leading into Potter’s.

And when he drew a shuddering breath not five minutes later, it was to the thought of Potter walking in on him, astonished and wide-eyed and flushed, and totally unable to look away.


	4. damned if i do, damned if i don't

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a brief scene with homophobic slurs. If you wish to avoid them, skip between “Peeves flew through a wall” and “For the second time that day”.

> _Dear Mother,_
> 
> _I hope you are well. Thank you for the cakes and biscuits you owled me last month. I put the Cloudberry Creams in the staffroom to share and they were gone in about five seconds._
> 
> _My friends from school came to celebrate Halloween in Hogsmeade, and ~~there’s been a slight~~_
> 
> _~~I find myself in the curious position of~~ _
> 
> _Do you remember when I asked you and Father for a snake for my ninth birthday, and you refused? I now have seven snakes in my care, believe it or not, although I hope it is only temporary. It’s a rather complicated story, but I hope I can tell it to you in full when I see you after New Year’s._
> 
> _Stay warm and be well. Love,_
> 
> _Draco_

Draco put away the Dictaquill and had the pendant read his letter twice before folding it up. It took some time to get his hands on an owl who was willing to make the trip to Norway, and longer still to tie the letter to its squirming leg, but Draco managed with minimal pecking. He gathered up his post—just the latest issues of _Witch Weekly_ and _Defensive Magical Theory Monthly_ , since the only other people who would be writing to him currently lacked the ability to hold a quill. He ambled down the spiraling stairs of the Owlery, wondering if he had enough time to get the pendant to read a few articles aloud for him, when a conversation caught his ear.

“—can’t keep him hanging like this. It’s not fair.”

“Honestly, I fail to see how my behaviour concerns you at all.”

The voices were quiet and tense, the sort of whispers that were two seconds away from becoming shouts. Draco usually ignored hallway gossip, but there was something familiar about these speakers that caught his ear. He shuffled closer just as the voices lowered, meaning that he could only hear about half of what was being said.

“—just stupid. I don’t know if it’s a British thing or whatever but ---------- being _so_ obvious!”

“You honestly have no idea what you’re talki---------- expect me to do?”

“Make a move, or somebody else will!”

“Is that a threat?”

“It might be.”

Draco squeezed his eyes shut, absurdly, as if it could help him hear any better.

“—thought you were into Cho?”

“Sure I am. So were you. Hey, two for two, that’s something we’ve got in common.”

“Oh my _god_.”

“Just listen, man, as Draco’s friend, I have to say—”

But whatever had to be said, Draco never found out, because at the mention of his name, he tried to scoot closer around the bend in the corridor and scooted directly into a suit of armour, which toppled over with a resounding _CRASH_. Draco gave a surprised shout as he went down with it in a painful, earsplitting tangle of limbs and metal.

“16th century breastplate, possibly Belgian in origin,” opined the pendant, swinging wildly around Draco’s neck.

It was always difficult to get up when one had fallen down unexpectedly, and doubly so when the pointy edge of a cuirass was digging into one’s shoulderblades. Draco flailed about ineffectually for a bit before the sound of approaching trainers heralded the approach of assistance.

“Merlin, Malfoy, are you all right?” Potter’s voice bounced along the corridor as he jogged closer.

Draco reached his bruised arms upward, grunting as Potter clasped him by both hands and hauled him up to a standing position. “Couldn’t be better. Oh, blast!” He tripped over an errant bit of metal and stumbled forward, but strong arms caught him. They skidded together, Draco’s hands braced on Potter’s chest so firmly that he could feel a heartbeat echoing his.

“I used to be graceful, you know,” Draco groused. He took a cautious step back and dusted off his robes, wincing where his tender flesh had been cruelly banged up by the armour. Potter’s hands still hovered around his waist as if his knees might buckle at any moment. “You couldn’t go five seconds without somebody shouting, ‘I say, if teaching doesn’t work out for that Professor Malfoy, he ought to go into the ballet. Or perhaps modelling.’ They would extoll the virtues of my fine cheekbones and supple limbs.”

“Yeah,” Potter replied, sounding distracted. He restored the armour to a proper standing position with a hastily-muttered spell. “Er, are you headed downstairs?”

Draco nodded, and reached out for Potter’s hand in a way that felt so natural after no longer than two weeks. The slide of Potter’s broad palm against his, the way Potter’s grip tightened fractionally whenever they encountered an obstacle or set of stairs—these were sensations that Draco had come to cherish, to the point where he almost began to wonder how long Pansy and Millie and Theo would really _mind_ spending as snakes? He ought to take his time with the coats, make sure they were properly crafted.

Because when his friends were turned back and his sight restored, Chang would go back to the Ministry, and Draco would move out of Potter’s rooms and back to his old spot beside Caleb at the dining table, and Draco would have to content himself with watching the back of Potter’s head at Quidditch matches, and how was he supposed to live like that?

Because when this was over, what reason could Potter possibly have to walk to breakfast with him and murmur in his ear and hold his hand and wish him sweet dreams every night? That way lay madness. Draco stuffed his feelings down with an irritable shake of his head and squeezed Potter’s hand a little tighter.

“Did you hear two people arguing in that hallway earlier?” he asked belatedly.

There was a hitch in Potter’s step, which Draco felt through their clasped hands like the clanging of a bell. “D-Don’t think so,” Potter stammered. “Er, where are you headed, anyway?”

“Just drop me off at the empty classroom on the fourth floor,” Draco told him. “Chang’s decided that I need extra tutoring.”

“Oh?” asked Potter, sounding perplexed.

“Yes, it’s to do with… Actually, it doesn’t matter,” Draco amended.

“…It does, actually,” Potter corrected him. “Because Cho asked me to go there too. It looks like I’m going to be giving you a Patronus lesson.”

Draco’s mind supplied a series of creative and unpleasant curses for Chang and the rest of Ravenclaw House, ranging from rapid and neverending eyebrow growth to one which imbued the victim’s socks with a perpetually damp squelchiness. But he was damned if he was going to appear weak in front of Potter, and anyway it would be very hard to run away down the corridor when Potter could see and he could not. Draco made a mental note to at least be quite rude to Chang the next time he saw her, as Potter led them into the classroom and guided Draco’s hand to the edge of a desk.

“Okay. So. What do you know about the Patronus?”

Draco gave a great, resigned groan as he leaned backwards against desk with his arms crossed. “One thinks of a fluffy, happy memory, and a magic animal springs forth from one’s wand, and the big scary Dementors go away. I’ve had the top minds of Prospero College’s Dark Arts faculty explain this to me at great length, and in great detail, to no avail.”

Rather than seeming put off, Potter sounded understanding and patient and kind. Ugh. “It’s a very difficult spell. I had a lot of trouble with it at the beginning.”

“When you were _thirteen_! And you managed to conjure up a corporeal Patronus strong enough to banish a hundred Dementors at once. I know. You’re in the training manual, you nitwit.” At Potter’s surprised noise, Draco barrelled on, “Yes, it was in both the main texts for my dissertation: _The Definitive Guide to Elite Defensive Practise_ as well as _Contemporary Counterattacks for Curses_. I had to summarise your teenage exploits in my essays.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose. “And even after reading those chapters, and having my tutors all take turns preaching at me, I _still_ can’t make a damned thing happen. So you can tell Chang you tried, and thank you very much, but there’s really no need for me to humiliate myself about it all over again.”

He launched himself off the edge of the desk and strode quickly towards what he hoped was the door. Blindness really did put quite a damper on his dramatic exits.

“Malfoy, wait.” Potter hastened to catch up, though didn’t grab him. Draco couldn’t decide whether he was disappointed or pleased about that. “Give me a chance. Let’s try it together. Please?”

Draco shut his eyes and reached out, and by the grace of Salazar there was a doorframe for him to cling to. Potter’s plea shot through his battered heart surer than an arrow, and as always, he was powerless to stand strong against it.

“…I’ll give you one hour,” he relented, while thinking of all the ways he could exact a not-quite-lethal revenge on Chang later.

“Brilliant. Come here, stand with me.” The force of Potter’s pleased relief was tangible. Draco sighed and gravitated towards his voice. “Okay, so, you’ve obviously got the theory down. And what were you using for a memory?”

_Opening Christmas presents with his parents. He was twelve, thirteen? Before things got bad. Mother sipping mulled wine from a silver goblet. Father brushing a lock of hair from Mother’s shoulder. We love you, Draco._

“…That’s a very personal question.”

“No, I understand,” Potter said quickly. “It can be very, er, intimate. Choosing a memory was the hardest part for me in the beginning. It has to be something very powerful, very intense. You have to be able to draw on it for that feeling of hope and the desire to survive. A lot of inherently happy memories aren’t strong enough for the Patronus Charm. Like, I tried using my first time on a broom, or winning the House Cup, and I couldn’t cast it properly.”

“So what memory did you end up using?” Draco asked, curious.

Potter coughed. “That’s a very personal question.”

“Touché.”

“Okay, think of it this way. Dementors are the embodiment of despair and darkness. They feed on souls and positive feelings, the very things that make us human.” Draco nodded, although he didn’t need reminding. The yearly visits that he and his mother made to Azkaban were the grimmest part of the year.

Potter continued, “So you have to choose a memory that’s happy, _purely_ happy and not linked with anything negative. I think that’s why it failed for me the first time. There’s a lot of anxiety and tension tied up in Quidditch games and flying. And even my memory of winning the House Cup didn’t work because there was usually something horrible going on at the end of the school year.” He laughed.

“ _Horrible_?” Draco echoed. “Come off it, Potter. The Golden Trio’s adventures were the envy of the entire school. You and Weasley and Granger got to run around fighting monsters, breaking curfew and about seventeen _thousand_ school rules, and then Dumbledore would give you the House Cup while the rest of us had to clap and cheer. You always got to be the hero.”

There was a heavy pause. “Not always.” 

“No, not _always_ ,” Draco conceded. He was sure they were thinking of the same things: a lifeless body in a maze, a battle at the Ministry, the Astronomy Tower. He took a deep breath. “How can a memory be purely happy, then, Potter? How can something exist that’s _so good_ it can’t be twisted into something dark?”

“Some things just are,” Potter insisted. “Often, I find it’s… the truth. Something that’s irrevocably, flawlessly true. That’s what Siri— That’s what someone else who dealt with Dementors told me. It wasn’t so much a happy memory was it was the knowledge of something true and real.”

They fell silent again, and Draco resisted the urge to shake his head and walk out of the room. He wanted to protest that there was no such thing as a memory that was wholly pure, or good, or true, or any of this Gryffindor balderdash.

“Right, well. Maybe we can just practice the wand movement, to start?” Potter ventured.

Draco had done the movement a thousand times before with his tutor: a simple circle. He demonstrated for Potter while holding back an eyeroll.

“Great! And now the incantation.”

“ _Expecto Patronum_ ,” said Draco obediently, making the circle with his wand once more.

“Okay, and now try it again. And this time, think of a memory; something different than the one you used before. And…” Potter shuffled, cleared his throat. “Could I stand with you and hold your hand? It sounds daft, but sometimes it helps.”

Draco’s heart flipped over. “We’ve been holding hands for ten days, Potter.” Not that he was counting.

“I know, but I just wanted to make sure it was okay.”

This time, Draco did roll his eyes. “ _Yes_ , you complete and utter pillock. Get it over with, before we both die of old age.”

And then Potter did something completely unexpected, which was to come around behind him and sort of… _embrace_ him. There was perhaps a hair’s breadth between Draco’s back and Potter’s front, and he positioned their arms close together, cradling Draco’s wand wrist gently in his hand.

“Ready?” Potter was shorter, so the puff of his breath tickled the back of Draco’s ear. Draco didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded. “Think of a good memory. We’ll try it together, okay?”

Whatever memory Draco was going to summon—strip karaoke at Pansy’s birthday, or clasping his honours diploma from Cambridge, or getting McGonagall’s owl offering him the job—was completely eclipsed by the sensation of Potter’s chest rising and falling with each breath, breaths that had synced up with Draco’s own. He couldn’t think straight for the gentle pressure of Potter’s fingertips on his wrist, the _there_ -ness of him that radiated from him like sunbeams.

No, Draco had nothing in his life that was pure and good and true. Nothing except one person, who was currently standing with him, who was always threatening to eclipse the darkness around Draco with his unbelievable nobility and bravery and tendency to save everyone in the world, including Draco, over and over again.

And before he could overthink it, Draco leaned back ever so slightly. Potter immediately steadied him, one hand just above his hip. Draco’s heart swooped, and he said in a voice thick with years of longing and apprehension and fear:

“ _Expecto Patronum!_ ”

Potter’s grasp tightened ever so slightly, and something happened—something which made the length of Draco's arm tingle while casting the spell in a way it never had before. They both gasped, and because of their proximity, Draco felt as if he were taking two breaths at once. It was like flying, dancing, and dreaming at the same time, and yet more marvellous than any of those could ever be.

“I say,” he whispered.

“That was _brilliant_. You felt that, right? It was just a wisp, not corporeal yet. But you're almost there.” Potter paused, swallowed. “That must have been a really happy memory.”

The hand on Draco’s hip moved incrementally, coaxing him, and he shifted trance-like in the circle of Potter’s arms. He could scarcely hear the soft susurration of their clothing above the incessant roar in his ears, and he was sure that Potter could feel his heart battering against his sternum like an animal in a cage.

“Potter…”

They were _so close_ that he swore he could feel the air leave his lungs as Potter inhaled. Potter’s fingers were still in a loose grasp around his wrist, and now his whole body was trembling, dizzy and mad with hope. His eyelids fluttered shut and he felt Potter press up on his toes to close the distance between them.

And then, in the ongoing disaster that was Draco’s existence, Peeves flew through a wall and shrieked, _“Oooooooh, SMOOCHIES!!!”_

Both of them nearly leapt out of their skin and sprang apart as if burned. Draco fell backwards into an ancient table, which immediately collapsed under his weight in a cloud of splinters and dust.

“Fuck, Peeves!” Potter shouted.

The poltergeist cackled, the sound bouncing off the walls as he zoomed around the room overhead. “Peeves came in to peek and found ‘em cheek-to-cheek! Molly Malfoy and Poofter Potter! Molly Malfoy and—”

“ _EXPECTO PATRONUM!_ ”

Draco bellowed the spell before he could think twice, and a rush of magic sailed down his arm and through his wand once more. There was a loud _whoosh_ , a shrill screech, and then silence.

For the second time that day, Potter helped Draco to his feet. He was beginning to feel rather battered. “Are you okay?”

“Still in one piece, although I could have done without being startled out of my wits. Or subjected to Victorian-era homophobic insults, for that matter.”

“Yeah, I know. And he didn’t even get his slurs right. I’m bi, not gay.” Potter laughed.

Before Draco could react to _that_ astounding tidbit of information, the door banged open and McGonagall demanded, “Is everything all right? Argus and I heard a commotion, and someone casting a Patronus!”

“Everything’s fine,” Potter assured her. “Peeves burst in while Malfoy and I were practising our spellcasting. His Patronus was substantial enough to send Peeves flying through the window.”

“I see! Well done, Professor Malfoy! Come along, Argus; I’m certain that one of those Hufflepuffs we passed was carrying a basket of Dungbombs.” Filch gave a growl, and the two of them swept out of the room. Draco straightened his robes, more muscle memory than anything. It was high time for a cup of tea in the staffroom, where he would studiously _not_ think about Potter’s lips inches away from the back of his neck, or his pulse leaping out of his wrist at Potter’s touch.

Potter cleared his throat and said, “You know, I can only think of one other time that I’ve seen a Patronus cast at something that wasn’t a Dementor.” 

“Yes, I remember,” Draco told him wryly. “It knocked me off my feet. Well, Goyle’s shoulders, really.”

“You deserved that. Merlin, what a terror you were.”

And even though he could hear Potter’s audible smile, that was the final nail in his good mood’s coffin. How Draco had managed to cast two partial Patronuses with thoughts and memories of Potter was truly a mystery. There was so much hostility and rejection and pain in their shared past, that thinking of Potter really should've produced a Dementor from his wand instead. Granted, Draco now knew that much of his childhood obsession with getting Potter’s attention was based on something quite different from hatred and loathing. But how could he ever dream that Potter might feel the same?

Attempting to control the waver in his voice, Draco said, “It was very kind of you to assist me today, Potter. I’m off to meet Chang to discuss our lesson plans for this week. I’ll see you at dinner.”

“Oh, all right.” For a moment, it sounded as if Potter were surprised—hurt—but Draco was probably just projecting. He turned and left the room, trailing his fingers along the cold stone walls as he made his own way.

* * *

Compounding his earlier disappointment with more bad news, Chang had been unable to uncover the blurry spot in Pansy’s memory from the night of the curse. She must have nearly worn herself out to the edge of her Legilimency prowess, because as Draco and Lovegood took Pansy back from her, Lovegood urged her to excuse herself from supper and get an early night’s sleep.

“It’s really lovely how this curse is bringing us closer together,” remarked Lovegood, floating the carrying crate ahead of her while Draco trailed behind with his hand on her shoulder. “Before this, I think the last time you spoke to me was after the Sorting Feast, when you apologised for stepping on my foot.”

Draco gave an awkward grunt. Trust Lovegood to keep a dated tally of all the ways he was horrible to his colleagues.

They made it to Potter’s rooms without crashing into anyone or anything. As Lovegood cast _Scourgify_ on her hands before gently transferring Pansy into the glass tank, Draco patted around his room in search of the dragonhide gloves and the scrap of cloth which he’d finished on Friday. He had asked her to bring a sewing needle, since trying to thread a needle while blind sounded like a surefire way to drive him mad in as little time as possible.

“Which of them should we try first?” she asked.

Draco sat down on his bed, hesitating. It seemed wrong to choose between them like this. But they needed to start somewhere. “One of the smallest. Daphne or Astoria, I suppose.”

“Daphne’s asleep. Astoria it is, then.” He heard Lovegood lift the lid of the tank again and begin coaxing the smaller garter snake in gentle tones. Holding the star-thorn cloth into a tube in his clumsy left hand, Draco began to sew it closed with his right. Deep, steady breaths helped keep him calm while he guided the needle in small loops through the edges of the fragile material.

“What a lovely pattern you have,” Lovegood was saying softly. “Such pretty stripes.”

The thick gloves made the work go slow, but Draco would have poked his finger with the needle several times without them. Not to mention the thorns that would immediately sink into the palms of his hands. He continued sewing—Lovegood babbling nonsense all the while—until he came to the end of the cloth and knotted the thread. She snipped the extra thread, and Draco held the finished garment in his hands, suddenly filled with trepidation.

“It’s not much of a garb, is it,” he said fretfully. “It’s just a tube. What if it’s all wrong? What if nothing happens?”

“There’s only one way to find out. Shall we?”

He heard Lovegood’s robes rustle as she reached into the tank and carefully picked one of the garter snakes up out of it. Then there was a gentle pressure on his hands as she laid the serpent down beside the finished coat.

Draco couldn’t decide whether to refer to them as ‘the snakes’ in his head. On one hand, it seemed a bit disrespectful to think of his Transfigured friends as creatures; just because their forms had shifted, didn’t mean that the essence of Theo and Blaise and Greg wasn’t still in there somewhere. But at the same time, Pansy wasn’t really acting like Pansy. Her chief concerns had shifted from Viennese legal treatises to warmth, food, and shelter. Salazar, he couldn’t wait until this was all behind them, when they could laugh about it over more wine than was strictly necessary.

During his small existential dilemma, Lovegood had succeeded in persuading Astoria to crawl most of the way through the star-thorn garment. Draco waited with his breath held as she slithered further and further in.

“Just a little more, my dear… yes… All right! Her head’s through! What a beautiful coat you made, Draco.”

He waited for a second. Two. Three.

“Is anything happening?” he asked, wild with not knowing. “Do you see any changes? Is she transforming back?”

But the constant, small weight in his hands told him all that he needed to know.

“I’m sorry,” Lovegood murmured. And this time he anticipated her touch on his arm, so he didn’t startle and drop Astoria to the ground. “Perhaps all seven of them need to be done at once? We’ll know for certain once Cho finds the last bit of the poem.”

Draco bowed his head. “I wish they had never come to visit me. We could have gone to Greg and Millie’s flat, or London. If I had just stopped Theo from snooping around… If I hadn’t opened Filch’s office door…”

There was a dip on the mattress as Lovegood sat down beside him. “We can’t rewrite the past, as much as we may wish to.”

“Don’t try and give me any guff about everything happening for a reason,” Draco snarled, his voice embarrassingly wet.

“I wasn’t going to. But I was going to say that your friends are very lucky to have you working on a solution for them. You’re a very capable wizard, you know.”

Draco hiccoughed and blotted his eyes on the sleeve of his robe, which was tricky since he was still holding Astoria in both hands. “You’ll be comparing me to a Thorn-Weaving Thunderbird or something next.”

“Oh, I don’t think the Scottish climate would agree with thunderbirds,” Lovegood mused. She rose and gently lifted Astoria from his hands, then slid the little coat off her before returning her to the tank. “I’m just going to put this coat to the right of the tank, all right? Now, would you like to go down to dinner together?”

He shook his head. The thought of sitting beside Potter after their earlier aborted _whatever_ was too much to bear. “I might ask a house-elf for something later.”

“If you’re sure.” There was no touch on his arm, or—Merlin forbid—a hug, but he could tell that Lovegood’s moony eyes were trained on him in their unnervingly contemplative fashion. “Good night, Draco.”

After the door closed, Draco rose and walked over to the loom. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought of Halloween night: Millie describing the new pastries she was working on at the restaurant, Greg wearing an expression of the purest pride; Pansy bringing them to side-splitting laughter with her bang-on impression of McGonagall; Blaise and Astoria having a rather serious conversation about the state of charms regulations across Europe; Theo with his hand on Daphne’s thigh under the table like they didn’t all know already.

They had been there for him through eight years of school, university and beginning their careers, and everything in between. How many nights had they spent sprawled in the Common Room doing homework, sharing gossip, scheming up plans to get Roger Davies and Blaise together? Or silently bringing him cups of cocoa when he stormed in with what Pansy deemed his ‘Post-Potter Pout’? Or standing together at Vince’s funeral, joined hands and quivering shoulders under a grey sky?

Having been through all that _and_ a war, Draco wasn’t about to be bested by a bloody curse. He plunged his hand into the basket of thorns, readied the loom, and began to weave.

* * *

By the third week of November, he had settled into a pattern. Breakfast, class, lunch, class, marking and preparation for the next class. From there, the rest of his afternoons and evenings were devoted to the weaving of star-thorn coats. He decided to work on Greg’s next, as it would need to be the largest. By Lovegood’s measurements, he was just under six feet long, so Draco would need to do a hell of a lot of weaving to make enough fabric to cover him.

Caleb gave him a hard time about it at first, cajoling him about skipping dinner and eating sandwiches in his room as if it had something to do with Potter. But he eased up after the sixth or seventh time Draco told him to mind his own business. Instead, Caleb spent more time with Chang, whom Draco had nearly slipped and called by her first name due to how often Caleb spoke about her. ‘Cho’s research on mnemonic theory’ and ‘Cho’s understanding of Obliviation mechanics’ and ‘Cho’s winter frock with the little buttons and frills’—Draco was sometimes tempted to cast a _Silencio_ on him.

Plus, it was good to immerse himself in the work, because that way he didn’t have time to think about Potter. Draco had always found it difficult to avoid Potter when they were younger, and it was impossible now that they were roommates and he relied on the other man to guide him to breakfast most mornings. He had seemed to sense Draco’s desire for distance since Sunday, taking the silence and closed doors with the meaning with which they were intended.

But it didn’t stop Draco’s heart from jumping into his mouth whenever Potter entered a space, whether it was their shared sitting room or the staff lounge or even the enormous courtyard where he’d once sat in a tree for hours, waiting for Potter to appear. It felt like he was attuned to Potter’s presence, drawn towards him like a moon in orbit, or a sunflower facing the sky, or any number of other embarrassing comparisons which made him bury his face in his pillow at night in mortifying shame.

Like now, for instance, when Potter barged into the room late on Thursday night smelling of the woods and apples and sweat, a combination that was rather lethal for Draco’s focus and general wellbeing. To his credit, his fingers only stuttered a little as Potter strode up behind him, breathing deeply and making the hair on the back of Draco’s neck tingle.

“Hey,” he said, setting something down on the floor. “Brought you some more star-thorn. It’s really fresh, so it should be easier to work with.”

_You’ve been watching me_ , Draco thought, but what he actually said was, “My hero.” The sneer in his voice was even weaker than usual, though. He wondered if Potter heard it as clearly as he did.

Potter gave a loud shiver as he moved about the room, shucking his cloak and ambling over to the hearth to throw another log on the fire. Draco heard the squeak of springs as he landed in his usual chair to take his shoes off. There was a rustle of paper, or perhaps of books, followed by a profound silence.

Draco was the one to break it. “What?”

“ _What_ what?”

“You’re staring at me.”

“I was _looking_ , not staring.” Potter paused. “How did you know?”

Draco scoffed. “What’s the Muggle phrase for it… ‘sixth sense’? Perception, intuition? I don’t need my eyes in order to tell when someone’s staring at me. And _you_ ,” he punctuated his words with a sharp tug on his thorn thread, “stared at me across the Great Hall for eight years, so I know very well what it feels like.”

“You usually stared back.”

Draco refused to dignify that with a response, although he was grateful that he was facing away so that Potter couldn’t see his lips quirk up in a half-unwilling smile.

“I was just thinking.”

“ _Shocking_.”

“Shut up.” Potter shifted about a bit more before blurting: “Wangothequitchgame?”

That finally made Draco pause. He set the shuttle down and twisted around on the bench to face the hearth. “Was that an English word, Potter? Or are you studying Gobbledegook in your spare time?”

“Shut _up_ ,” Potter repeated, and this time it was muffled, as if he was hiding his face behind his hands. “Merlin, you always make everything so… argh.” He shifted noisily in his chair before speaking carefully. “Do you want to go to the Quidditch game with me this Saturday.”

Draco blinked. “We always go to the Quidditch games, Potter. All the staff have to attend in the name of school spirit and all that.”

“I know that. I just wondered if you wanted to go, y’know. _With me._.”

Oh.

_Oh._

“Oh?” he squeaked. The delicate Malfoy complexion was really not designed for sudden leaps between ‘pale and dignified’ to ‘redder than a sunburned Weasley.’ A hot blush surged up his neck and cheeks with such alacrity that he felt a little lightheaded.

“Well, you don’t have to. I just thought…” _Shuffle, shuffle._

“Merlin! Some Gryffindor you are,” scoffed Draco, who once again found it easier to produce these light barbs than to wrap around his head around the notion of Harry Potter asking him out on a date. “Very well, yes, if only to shut you up about it. Goodness knows you’re loud enough to wake the dead when you’re cheerful; I shudder to think how cacophonous you’d be in a foul mood.”

There was a squeak of springs as Potter lurched out of his chair. “Wait, really?”

“Yes, _really_. We’re thirty years old, Potter, there’s no need to go into hysterics.” Draco rolled his eyes, back to be on familiar ground again.

“Okay. Er. Brilliant! Well. You should go to bed soon, okay? Don’t stay up too late.”

“Merlin’s bones. Go to bed before I change my mind.” Draco sniffed as he took up the shuttle with hands that were only a little bit unsteady.

Potter laughed. “Good night, Malfoy.”

And then he passed so close to Draco on his way to bed that the slightest shift would have brought them into contact, and Draco was consumed by the memory of standing in Potter’s arms in that empty classroom, and the way time had seemed to slow down and become meaningless with him so near, which made it _very_ difficult to get any more work done that night.

* * *

But of course on Saturday, one of his warp threads came loose, and he had an absolute devil of a time finding the itty-bitty peg it was supposed to hook back onto, which meant that he was horribly behind the six inches he promised himself he would do that morning, which meant that Potter came banging into the room long after they were supposed to meet in the Entrance Hall.

“You know, if you didn’t want to come, you could have just—” Potter broke off with a slightly strangled noise.

“Could have just _what _,” Draco demanded, the threaded shuttle flying between his gloved hands.__

Potter gave a sort of tremulous sound from the back of his throat before saying, “You look really nice.”

Draco furrowed his brow, thinking hard, before remembering he had chosen the teal waistcoat with a striped white shirt and fitted light grey trousers. It was a dressier outfit than he normally wore on weekdays under his professor’s robes, and rather ruined by the fact that he had loosened his silk tie, unbuttoned his shirt at the throat, and rolled his sleeves up to work on the misbehaving loom. With his hair a sweaty mess and the flush of exertion on his cheeks, he must have looked like an unkempt wreck.

“Don’t be absurd. You’re a horrible liar.”

“I’m not. You do,” Potter insisted, still sounding a bit stunned. “And anyway, what are you doing up here? If you’ve changed your mind about the game…”

“I haven’t. I just lost track of time.” Draco ran his fingers across the bit he’d completed that day. Five and a half inches, or thereabouts. Close enough. He heaved a sigh and flung the gloves off. Then a thought occurred to him. “How’d you know where to find me?”

Potter fidgeted. “Well, you’ve been working at the loom every waking hour for the past couple of weeks. Call it a wild guess.”

Draco harrumphed as he rose and put his shirt and tie back in order, then reached around the corner into his bedroom and grabbed a warm cloak, scarf, and gloves. “You know, back in school I used to think that you had some sort of magical way of always knowing where I was.”

“Did you?” From the sound of it, Potter’s smile took up his entire face.

“Mm.” Draco tugged on his gloves, grateful for the thin and supple suede; a remarkable contrast from the beefy dragonhide. “And for Salazar’s sake, don’t tell me you _did_ , or else I shall truly lose my mind.”

But he felt his resolve start to wane even as Potter took him by the hand and they walked the well-worn path to the Quidditch pitch. “What if I get hit by a Bludger?” his treacherous mouth supplied, and: “It’s useless for me to go; it’ll be no better than listening to the game on the wireless, and then at least I can get more weaving done,” and: “I’m rather cold—are you cold? Should I go back and get a jumper?

“Malfoy,” Potter said at last, pausing on the creaky wooden stairs up to the spectators’ stands. His voice sounded odd in the cavernous space beneath the ring of the pitch, both magnified by the great height of the walls and muffled by the great swaths of fabric flapping in the wind. “What’s wrong? You clearly don’t want to be here. If it’s because of me, just _tell me_ , and I’ll never mention it again. And I’m sure McGonagall can find you another room—”

“It’s not that,” Draco insisted, clinging to Potter’s hand so hard it must have hurt. “But it seems so foolish to put my feet up and worry about Slytherin’s Chasers’ technique and be on a bloody _date_ with you when there’s a curse to be broken!”

Potter squeezed his hand back just as tightly. “But you’re working to break it. You _are_ ,” he insisted when Draco shook his head. “We all are. You and Luna are keeping them fed, and Neville and I got you those fresh star-thorns, and Cho and Perez are doing their research. You’ve been weaving nonstop for days. You should take a break because I don’t want you to wear yourself out, and besides,” he swallowed, “ever since Sunday, I’ve been thinking how badly I want to kiss you.”

And it was just as well that they were on the stairs, because Potter was standing on the step above him, which meant that they were the same height when Draco fisted his hands in the lapels of his jacket and drew them together. The tip of his nose was freezing but his mouth was _so warm_ , and so were his hands, cradling Draco’s jaw as if he were something to be cherished and protected. His lips were softer than Draco had ever dreamed, and the scrape of his stubble and the soft hums issuing from his throat set fire to Draco’s veins. It made every time they had touched before—fistfights, duels, that nightmarish inferno—slip away like the remnants of a bad dream. 

He had always wondered how Potter had been able to cast a Patronus strong enough to ward off a hundred Dementors at once. He felt, at last, that he finally understood.


	5. it's a fine romance, but it's left me so undone

If Draco thought that weaving was difficult when he had teaching and marking to worry about, it was made nigh-impossible by the addition of a very intently affectionate Harry Potter sharing his living space. Chang would walk him back from class and Potter, whose classroom was closer to their rooms, would be there waiting for him. No sooner had they closed the front door than Potter would be on him: gently unbuckling the cloak clasp at his throat, sliding the heavy material down his shoulders before hanging it on the coat hook. He was horrible at making tea—burning his hand on the kettle, spilling tea leaves all over the place—but he always had a cup waiting for Draco, earl grey with a slice of lemon just the way he liked it. (“Only _you_ would drink English tea in a poncy French way, Malfoy,” he said, nuzzling his stubbly beard against Draco’s cheek.)

They went for long walks in the frail winter sunlight and held hands long after they had arrived at their destination. Draco learned the smooth surface of his palm and the rough edges where he had a horrible habit of gnawing at his nails. Potter's foot nudged his under the staff table at every meal while Draco dropped crumbs in his lap and knocked over goblets of pumpkin juice. He was sure that he was as obvious as a beacon in the night, and judging by the tender warmth to his voice, Potter was no better. Another item for the Things Not So Bad About Being Blind list, then: he didn't have to endure the insufferable _go get ‘im, tiger_ looks that Caleb was probably directing his way.

Sometimes he would take a break from weaving to roll his shoulders and stretch his neck, and Potter would be right beside him to knead the stiff muscles while pressing kisses to Draco’s hair, his temples, the backs of his ears. Sometimes Potter would be in their shared bathroom brushing his teeth, and Draco would trail in, holding out his hand for the toothbrush that Potter had already supplied with a small blob of toothpaste, and afterwards he would crowd Potter against the cold counter, fingertips exploring the small strip of warm skin above the low waistband of Potter’s horrid Muggle joggers as their slick, minty tongues slid against one another.

Sometimes it felt surreal, as if he was just playacting another version of himself who deserved to be kissed, who hadn’t broken Potter’s nose and insulted his friends and been on the wrong side of a war. It felt like a dream, except that Draco’s dreams were rarely so horribly and satisfyingly domestic.

But for all that, they hadn’t gone any further yet. Draco had drawn the line one night when they were sprawled on the thick rug by the fire after supper. Potter’s plush mouth tasted of port and the chocolates they were feeding each other with their fingers, and Draco felt so overwhelmed by bliss that it felt as if he’d drunk a whole case of port instead of the several delicate sips he’d actually consumed. So when Potter’s hands drifted down to his trouser zipper and began first petting, then unzipping, Draco had to haul himself out of a thick, dreamy fog in order to whisper, “Wait.”

“Really?” Potter’s hands stilled, although his lips kept moving, mouthing aside the unbuttoned edges of Draco’s shirt to lick at his Adam’s apple, the shallow dip in his collarbone. “Merlin, you taste so good.”

“Yes, Potter, really,” Draco said, although he couldn’t resist thrusting his hips up just once against the press of Potter’s hand, which made them both moan. He reached down and tugged at the back of Potter’s neck until their mouths came together again, and he allowed himself to be pushed down into the floor by the weight of Potter sprawled atop him. After Potter deigned to release his lower lip from where he was worrying it gently with his teeth, Draco managed to say, “I want to see you.”

“What?” Potter paused and drew back.

Draco opened his eyes, hoping that they were aimed at least mostly at Potter. “If we… when we…” His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard, fighting for control. “If you’re going to make me come, and I’m going to do the same to you, I want to wait until I can see your face. I want to see exactly how you look when you tip over the edge.”

“Jesus, Malfoy,” Potter said roughly. That was another thing: the way he said ‘Malfoy’ was now a benediction, an endearment, rather than the gauntlet-throwing it had always been in school. Potter bent down and kissed him again, rough and wild and needy. After a miniature eternity, he extricated himself from the arms that Draco had twined around his shoulders.

“You’d better get some weaving done or something,” he panted. The warmth of his breath upon Draco’s mouth sent a tremor down the length of his body.

He sat up, certain that he was a portrait of a debauched man: dishevelled hair, swollen mouth, splotchy cheeks. Potter’s liberal use of teeth had probably left dozens of lovebites all over his throat. “Why? What are you going to do?”

“Exactly what _you_ were doing in the bathtub last week,” Potter replied in a jagged murmur, giving Draco’s earlobe a wicked little nip. “Shall I leave the door open or closed?”

Draco fumbled around until he found a pillow to lob at him, and was satisfied to hear a soft “oof!” which meant that he’d found his target. Then he listened to the muted sound of running water with one hand tucked behind his head, and the other idly tracing the outline of his half-hard cock through his trousers. In the end he opted for bringing himself off right there on the hearth rug, inexplicably turned on by the idea of Potter doing the same in the next room. The imprint of his teeth in his lower lip still hadn’t faded by the time he cleaned up and fell asleep in his own bed.

In an absurd turn of events, the extra incentive of going further with Potter really did make his work go faster. Draco devoted nearly every spare moment to weaving, which meant that he finished Greg’s coat by the end of the week. Potter fell into the habit of sitting with the snakes while Draco wove, and he found the sibilant sounds of their conversation oddly soothing. (“Millie’s sick of cicadas,” he reported to Draco. “And Daphne—is this Daphne or Astoria?—anyway, she wants to know why it’s so dry in the tank.”

“It’s for Pansy’s skin, and she knows that,” Draco replied absently, winding more star-thorn around the shuttle. “Now, tell her to behave or I shall put a loathsome little ruffle around the waistline of her coat.”

“Do snakes have waistlines?”

“Shut up, Potter.”)

By the end of the first week of December, he had finished three of the coats and was in the frustrating position of waiting for the new batch of star-thorns to finish maturing in Longbottom’s greenhouse. There was still plenty to do; their Wednesday War Councils were filled with animated discussions about the snakes’ wellbeing as well as the nature of the _Serpens_ Curse. Caleb, whose Translation Charm was the best of any of them, had written to colleagues in Prague and Wrocław to ask about the figurine. But the information he received back was dicey; it seemed that the snake curse was specific to a particular village, and that Jena’s family had likely only known about it if they were descendents of the medieval witches who invented the spell.

It also transpired during this meeting that Draco hadn’t had a medical examination apart from Pomfrey’s once-over the night of the curse. McGonagall and Granger flew into identical flurries of concern, which would have been hilarious if it didn’t make him feel like a small child.

“Headmistress, I swear I wrote to St Mungo’s on Halloween and asked them to send an ocular specialist!”

“This should have been top priority, I do not understand why—!”

“Granger doesn’t even work here,” Draco muttered to Potter. “Doesn’t she have a full-time job at the Ministry? How does she stay on top of everything without completely losing the plot?”

“It’s Hermione,” replied Potter, as if that explained everything, which it sort of did.

Which was how Draco found himself being dragged up to the Hospital Wing one Friday night after supper, whinging to Potter the entire time. “I hate being poked and prodded. This is all a terrible influence from the Muggle world, you know, all this fascination with surgery and bandages and that dreadful _Doctor Who_.”

“Doctor Who isn’t really a doctor, you know.” Potter laughed.

“An unlicensed medical professional! Good grief.” The strong odour of healing potions wafted down the corridor and Draco began dragging his feet in earnest. “I’m serious, Potter, I don’t like Healers or anything of the sort. In normal wizarding families, one just casts a Wellness Ward over one’s children and then asks a house-elf to make a bowl of consommé if they’re poorly. This Healer’s going to want to take my temperature with a _therm_ -o’meter and it’s going to be absolutely barbaric.”

“Malfoy.” Potter drew to a halt and took both of Draco’s hands in his. “It’s going to be okay. Just a quick check-up to appease Hermione and McGonagall, and you’re right as rain, so you’ll be fine.” He drew close and, in a shocking public display of affection, drew Draco’s head down a fraction and tenderly kissed him on each eyelid. Draco traced his hands up Potter’s arms to hold him there, since every touch of Potter’s lips still sent a fresh wave of incredulity coursing through him, more effective than any _Stupefy_.

“I’m going to the library, but I’ll be back to fetch you in about an hour, yeah?”

Draco nodded and reluctantly released him, though not before burying his nose in Potter’s hair for a brief moment. He had discovered a newfound appreciation for the unruly mess now that he was allowed to touch it, to run his fingertips along Potter’s scalp and the back of his neck. It was the absolute antithesis to the star-thorn, thick and softer than eiderdown. He was loath to let Potter go, but managed to console them both with tempting murmurs of what they would get up to by the fireside later that evening. Potter squeezed his hand and gave him a gentle push towards the Hospital Wing doors before he could get too worked up about it.

Draco hated the woman from St Mungo’s. Her name was Florence and she shoved him about worse than Chang, which was saying something. First, she grabbed him by the wrist to jostle him over to an examination cot, then she shoved him down onto it by pushing him backwards by the shoulders. Her hands were clammy and she smelled so strongly of old milk that Draco started to hold his breath whenever she drew near.

She cast some diagnostic spells while prising his eyelids apart with her cold fingers, then went “Hm!” and began to scribble on a piece of parchment.

“All set,” she said, after not more than five minutes.

“I beg your pardon?” Draco asked, taken aback.

“ALL. SET,” she repeated in her nasty, grating voice, loudly, as if he were both hard of hearing and very stupid. “The curse is blocking the receptors in your optic nerves. Just perform the counter-curse, and things should go back to normal.”

“Oh, _just perform the counter-curse_ , hm?” Draco heard his voice go all shrill the way it did when he was forced to converse with somebody infuriating. “Just, ‘One two three, I want to see’ and _poof_ , that’s it?”

“Counter-curses are much more complicated than that, Mr Malfoy,” Florence said snidely.

“You don’t need to tell me!” Draco snapped. “I’m the professor of Defence Against the Bloody Dark Arts!”

Florence sniffed. “There’s no need to be foul-mouthed, young man. Good evening to you.” And she began to gather up her things, while he tried to decide whether he was more outraged at her snippy lecture or at being addressed as ‘young man.’ After gathering his remaining senses, he stood and stormed out of the Hospital Wing, or rather, proceeded cautiously but steadily ahead with his arms splayed out to avoid bumping into any wayward curtain dividers. He stalked steadily down the corridor, trailing a hand against the wall and fuming. Horrid woman and her horrid cold hands and stink. He knew he hated Healers for a good reason.

It wasn’t until he reached the Grand Staircase that he remembered Potter had said he would go to the library for the supposed hour that Draco’s appointment would take. So instead of heading for their tower, he decided to brave his way up to the library to meet Potter there.

The tall, multistory passage was quiet as he climbed the stairs. He supposed that most students were working in their common rooms or doing various extracurricular activities. Choir, for example, met on Tuesday and Friday nights. Fridays were also the meeting day for the craft club, which Draco only knew about because he always had to deduct house points from a gaggle of Hufflepuff girls who insisted on knitting in their laps during lecture. He’d always been able to spot the distinctive movements of their elbows quite easily, although he wondered if they’d picked up the habit again now that he was unable to see. He made a mental note to remind Cho to look out for them during the next class.

As he continued to climb, with one hand gliding along the bannister, he gradually became aware of other footsteps behind him. He paused to let the person pass, since he had acquired a dislike for being jostled on the narrow stairs while he was walking. But instead of skipping ahead, the footsteps ceased along with him—then resumed when he began to walk again as well.

Draco frowned, annoyed. Perhaps the person was afraid of walking near him, like so many of the younger students were? He paused again; the footsteps ceased. And this time, Draco turned his head over his shoulder and addressed them. “You can go ahead, you know. Don’t delay on my account.”

There was no response.

He swallowed. “Hello? Who’s there?”

A frosty silence met his question, although he was _certain_ that somebody was just a few steps below him. Draco strained his ears and picked up the quiet sound of the other person breathing. It was barely audible over the way his heart had begun to pound.

“Who’s there?” he demanded again.

And when the other person didn’t respond, Draco turned forward and ran.

He had never been more grateful for the physical speed and strength he’d honed during years of regular Quidditch practice, and never more regretful that he hadn’t kept up a regular exercise regime since then. His feet carried him unfailingly up the stairs, although his breath quickly grew laboured through exertion and fright. He relied on the bannisters under his hand to guide his steps, the bends and breaks informing him of landings on the stairs. 

When the last bannister ended and Draco’s hand met empty air instead of the guiding rail, he simply continued to run. The soles of his shoes slapped against the stone floor in a steady, haunting percussion, accompanied by the horrible rattle of his heart around his ribcage. In his panicked flight, he wished desperately that he had anyone with him: Caleb, with his expert guidance and reassuring voice; Potter with his warm hands and squeaky trainers; he would have even welcomed Lovegood, with her ceaseless rambling and inane animal comments. He wished that anyone were there to help, because the other person’s footsteps were drawing closer, and their breathing louder, and at any moment he would feel the snatch of grasping fingers on his cloak sleeves or his hair and then it would all be over.

Through the changing echo of his footsteps, he heard, or perhaps sensed, a turn in the corridor, but misjudged the distance and caught his foot on the corner and went sprawling to his hands and knees with a burst of pain. Before he could reflect on that too long, however, he whirled into a sitting position and grabbed his wand out of his pocket, and flung his arm into a ramrod-straight duelling position.

“Back off!” He drew breath in great heaves, splayed legs trembling but channelling all of his outrage into the grip on his wand. “I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, harassing a professor, but let me be perfectly clear: the next time this happens I will hex you so badly they’ll have to scrape bits of you off the wall.”

His blood roared in his ears but he still heard a second set of breaths, ragged and wheezing. But what sent a shiver down his spine was the whisper of a laugh: quiet and dark, and undeniably sinister. Draco resisted the urge to back away, feeling his vulnerability and terror coursing through his veins like acid. What form would a blind person’s Boggart take? he wondered suddenly. Was it not enough to be completely at the mercy of everyone else who could see?

Before he could think twice, he uttered, “ _Calvus ubique!_ ”

There was a shout of surprised outrage as his hex found its mark, and his pursuer found all of the hair Vanished from their body. An extra flick of his wand ensured that their clothes disappeared too. Draco listened carefully to the wordless stuttering; he thought the person must be a man, maybe a sixth or seventh year. As the person turned tail and ran, he had the satisfaction of knowing that whoever was caught creeping back into their common room stark naked and bald from head to toe, news of their identity would be all over the castle before dawn.

And finally, finally, he lowered his wand and began to weep.

He slumped to the side, found a bend in the wall concealed by a thick tapestry, and crawled behind it as sobs wracked his body. Summoning a Muffling Charm seemed to require too much energy, so he simply curled into a ball in the quiet solace of the alcove and bawled.

He’d sniffled a bit in front of Lovegood recently, but apart from that, he had been successful in holding back all his frustration and dread over the curse. He had resolved to be strong for his friends, to perform the counter-curse so that they could all get back to their lives, as merry and content as they had been on Halloween.

But his blindness turned it from a hero’s mission into a preposterous, Sisyphean quest. He was doomed to failure; who knew if the coats had been properly crafted in a way that would break the spell? What lay in the hidden stanza of the poem, and what hoops would he have to jump through about moons and dawns to restore his friends to their human forms? And how was he supposed to carry on with his job and his life _and_ the curse-breaking with a silent stalker following him through the halls? Was he supposed to have a sighted escort at every moment to protect him from assailants?

The sounds of his wet, all-encompassing sobs bounced around the alcove, magnified to his sensitive ears. The adrenaline turned sour in his blood and made him feel exhausted and wretched and ill. Draco cursed his unseen follower, and Jena Jelinek for bringing a Dark object to class for show-and-tell, and the 12th century Silesian witches, and Florence from St Mungo’s who smelled like old milk. He cursed and cried with abandon he had not shown since he was a sixth year alone in a bathroom, once again shouldered with an impossible task.

And once again, it was Harry Potter who found him.

“Hey, hey, what’s wrong?” he said quietly, drawing aside the tapestry so that it brushed Draco’s leg. Draco flinched and covered his face with his hands, turning away. “Merlin, what happened?”

“S-s-someone was following me,” Draco wept into the crook of his elbow. He sounded pathetic, whiny, and small. Then he found himself wishing that his mother was there, with her delicate perfume, gentle embrace, and soft whispers, and the sudden humiliation of that longing sent a fresh wave of sobs through his shaking and bruised frame.

Instead it was Potter who slowly laid two hands on his shoulders, then drew him into a gentle but firm embrace there on the stone floor. Draco clung to him and cried until his eyes ran dry and the tremors in his shoulders mostly ceased and the neck of Potter’s robes was completely soaked. He took in an enormous breath and patted around his cloak pockets for a handkerchief.

“How did you find me? How do you _always_ know where to find me?” he asked hoarsely after sniffling into his hankie.

Potter sat back, although he let his hand rest lightly on Draco’s knee. “Magic map. You were right all along. I just didn’t feel like distracting you from our first kiss by telling you.”

“Ha! I knew it.” Draco laughed tremulously. “Fucking Potter. Magic cloak, magic map. How on earth would you have made it through school if you didn’t have all these extra enchanted bits and bobs?”

“I probably would’ve died more often than I actually did,” Potter replied wryly. “C’mon, let’s get you back to our room and I’ll tell you all about it.”

He helped Draco to a standing position onto bruised and wobbly legs before casting healing spells on his kneecaps and the heels of his hands. Draco vaguely registered that it was the very first time Potter had cast a spell on him that wasn’t a hex in a corridor, a jinx thrown in battle. Potter’s magic had all the subtlety of a tidal wave while bestowing a comforting sensation like a jacket recently taken off his own shoulders and draped around Draco’s own. He shivered.

When they joined hands, Draco interlaced their fingers instead of the usual clasp of Potter’s four fingers over his own. It felt right, more permanent, as if he could keep Potter from ever letting go again. He tucked their joined hands into Potter’s robe pocket for good measure, uncaring of how they might have looked to anyone else.

He was only half-listening to the soothing, steady lilt of Potter’s voice as they walked back down the stairs and towards his— _their_ rooms. Something about a rat, and a dog, and a wolf, and his parents. Part of Draco was still convinced that his unseen follower would spring out at any moment to finish what they had started: breaking their hands apart, pushing Potter down the stairs, pressing cold fingers to Draco’s throat. But another part of him knew, without a doubt, that nothing bad could happen to him while he was with Potter.

When they entered their warm, familiar sitting room, Potter walked them to Draco’s bedroom door. He gently slid their hands out of his pocket and began to guide Draco’s hand towards the doorframe. “Are you gonna be okay?”

Draco shook his head immediately, not letting go of Potter. “Don’t leave me alone. Please,” and the last word wasn’t even a whisper; just a plea under his breath.

After a beat, Potter went, “Okay,” and led them into Draco’s room. He slid open a drawer, removed some things, and then led them back through the lounge towards his bedroom.

There was something deeply intimate about being in someone else’s room. They had spent the past two weeks of being colleagues-who-were-kissing-now almost everywhere in their communal spaces: beside the bathroom sink, sprawled together on the sofa by the fire, and once, memorably, with Draco in Potter’s lap as he attempted to clean off the surface of his desk. (“Malfoy, if I’d known that tidying got you so hot and bothered, I would have sorted out this clutter ages ago.”)

But stepping into Potter’s personal space was on a completely different level. The sharp, fresh, masculine scent of him was everywhere, and Draco wanted to drown in it. It was warm and cosy in a way that Draco had only read about in novels. Growing up in Malfoy Manor, and then in the Slytherin dormitories under the lake, he was accustomed to grandiose austerity and look-but-don’t-touch luxury. Potter’s room felt like _home_.

Draco felt so comfortable, in fact, that he finally released his death grip on Potter’s hand, which allowed Potter to gently work the clasp on his robes and guide them carefully down Draco’s arms. He was so burnt out from the terrible encounter that he even forgot to snippily remind Potter to hang the robes up and not throw them over a chair like a heathen.

He raised his hands to loosen his tie, but Potter murmured, “Let me?” And at Draco’s nod, Potter’s hands were there, mirror images of his own: gently tugging at the silken knot at his throat, and then working at the three buttons on his waistcoat (notched thrice for blue), and then sliding each minuscule mother-of-pearl button through the holes on his shirt (notched twice for white). He even removed Draco’s cufflinks and dropped them into his breast pocket for safekeeping. He was standing so close that when he carefully drew apart both halves of the shirt and slid the fabric from his shoulders, Draco felt the warmth radiating off him in bursts and waves. He had seen Draco’s _Sectumsempra_ scars before—it had caused an awkward hiccup in that particular round of snogging—but now he ran his fingers over them with something on the edge of reverence.

Next, several soft clinks and chimes as Potter guided the leather belt out of its buckle and let the loose ends dangle as he focused his attention on Draco’s trouser button and zip. Draco had always thought—when he allowed himself the luxury of thinking about it—that the first time Potter undressed him would be more feverish and frantic, a riot of cloth crushed in fists and buttons flying to all corners of the room in their haste. But judging by the loud, shaky breathing that accompanied his own, Potter objected to this slow and deliberate unwrapping as little as Draco did.

Potter led him forward a few steps, then sat on the edge of the bed and led Draco’s hands to rest on his shoulders. He was correct to interpret the soft tap on his left foot as an instruction to raise it, because Potter deftly untied his laces and then slid his shoe and sock off. _Like a reverse Cinderella_ , Draco marvelled dazedly as Potter repeated this on the other foot. Finally, he allowed his unbuttoned trousers to pool at his ankles, then stepped out of them and into the welcoming V of Potter’s parted thighs.

“Gorgeous,” Potter murmured brokenly, drawing his fingertips along the pale hair on Draco’s thighs and up to his hips. Through the thin cotton of his pants, Draco felt the heat of Potter’s palms like a bonfire. He moved one hand to turn Draco’s left arm slightly outward, and with a ripple of revulsion, Draco recalled what he was looking at: a faded tattoo upon the skin, smudged and grey like an unhealed bruise. And then he inhaled sharply, a shocked gasp, when Potter pressed a soft, chaste kiss to the ruined flesh.

“Potter…”

“Arms up?”

Draco did, nonplussed, and was pleasantly surprised to find his arms and head sliding into a soft brushed cotton garment which fell generously to his knees.

Potter gave an odd little cough. “Er, did the house-elves mix up your laundry with someone else’s? I grabbed this from your pyjama drawer, but it looks like a dress.”

“Don’t be ludicrous,” Draco sniffed. “It’s a nightshirt. It’s traditional wizarding sleepwear.”

“But—” Potter struggled to find the words. “Where are the trousers?”

“Very funny, Potter.” Draco at last raised his own hands to finish lacing the garment at the throat, since Potter seemed too hung up on the concept to make himself useful.

He grumbled something like, “How do you look good in _everything_ ,” before the swishing of fabric indicated that he was seeing to his own clothes. Draco turned away from him, suddenly shy now that Potter was the one getting undressed, even though he couldn’t see a thing. His imagination supplied images of Potter doing that delightfully masculine and Mugglish move of pulling his shirt off in one fluid motion by grasping behind him at his shoulderblades, a manoeuvre that Draco had spied once after a Slytherin-Gryffindor Quidditch match and then spent the next several weeks frantically replaying in his mind.

At last, he heard the soft _swish_ of sheets being drawn back, and he felt a reverberation through his thigh as Potter patted the mattress. He cast a Warming Charm as he said, “C’mon in.”

The shaky, awful terror which had made him feel like a hunted rabbit was beginning at last to fade away, leaving him simply exhausted. Draco crawled into the soft sheets and gravitated into the crook of Potter’s arm like it was second nature. Clichés about puzzle pieces and keys fitting into locks came to mind, although they all slipped away as he nestled his head against Potter’s shoulder and loosely hooked his fingers around the collar of his t-shirt.

The words slipped out before his exhausted senses could tug them back. “This is your Puddlemere shirt.”

“…Yeah,” replied Potter, sounding stunned. “How’d you know?”

“‘S got a little hole in the front.” Draco’s hand drifted over to rest over Potter’s left breast. His fingertips found the little gap in the fabric where the corner seam of the pocket had worn thin over years of use. He had first spotted it one evening last year when the teachers were summoned from their beds to deal with Peeves and a basket of exploding Easter eggs. Standing bleary-eyed in the dim corridors at three in the morning, with the rancid, sulphuric smell of the poltergeist’s prank all around them, all Draco could focus on was the little hole in Potter’s shirt beside the Puddlemere United logo, offering a small glimpse of the beautiful brown skin beneath. Draco touched it now, and felt the gentle thump of Potter’s heartbeat beneath his questing fingers.

“Malfoy,” breathed Potter, “ _When_ did you know?” And Draco knew he wasn’t talking about the Puddlemere shirt.

He could be a revisionist. He could tell Potter it was their first brief conversation in Madam Malkin’s; or when he saw Potter streak off through the sky to catch Longbottom’s Remembrall, all impulse and temper. He could point to any number of times his heart stuttered at the sight of Potter: the Triwizard Yule Ball; the parlour at the Manor; a room filled with Fiendfyre and smoke; the dismal Ministry corridor where Potter had pressed the hawthorn wand into his hands after giving his testimony. The scorching summer day at the end of eighth year when they’d all gone swimming in the lake, Potter’s laugh bouncing across the surface of the water to where the Slytherins were huddled in the shallows.

The way his pulse had leapt when McGonagall had announced, “I think you’re all familiar with our new Muggle Studies professor.”

Hundreds of punches thrown in the secret hope of touching, catching, holding on. Thousands of lashing insults inspired by something more complicated than loathing; something that made him feel dizzy with its all-consuming depth. How could he point to any one of these moments and say _there, that’s the one; that’s the note in the melody, the star in the sky, that’s when I knew_?

So instead, he said, “I’ve known for a while,” and wrapped his arm around Potter’s waist.

Potter shifted to draw him in closer, and their breaths grew slower in unison until Draco was just on the cusp of sleep. The rumble in Potter’s chest was the only thing that convinced him he didn’t imagine it when Potter murmured, “I’m with you however long this takes, and beyond. I’m with you.”

Draco nodded, and tucked it away in his heart, and slept.

* * *

Potter was gone that weekend to visit Andromeda and Teddy, and while he tried valiantly to persuade Draco to come along, he held his ground. “I refuse to introduce myself to my second cousin under the influence of a curse,” he insisted. “But I do have grand plans. When this is over, we shall take Edward to the cinema and afterwards, a carousel ride and hot chocolate.”

“…Is that what you think people do for fun, Malfoy?”

“It _is_ fun, and you’re just afraid that Edward will like me more than you.”

“Oh, you _wish_.”

 _This_ , they had taken to calling the curse. After _this_. I hate _this_. When _this_ is all over.

Potter had kissed him squarely on the mouth before trailing kisses down his neck, then one arm, then his bony knuckles, and finally his lightly-scarred palms, to bid him farewell. Draco felt as if Potter had laid embers upon him with each kiss, and he savoured those blessed places with a faint smile on his lips as he sat down at the loom. He was completely aware that Pansy and Blaise would have taken him to absolute pieces for becoming so soft and gentle, but at the moment, he couldn’t really bring himself to care. When he’d spent his whole life feeling bruised and empty and alone, he welcomed Potter’s tender ministrations like a drowning man gasping for air.

Longbottom had delivered a small basket of star-thorn, meaning Draco was able to keep himself busy and not do self-destructive things like worry about whether the curse would ever be broken. Because sometimes, when he was alone in their rooms, he would take out his three completed thorn coats and persuade Astoria and Greg and Pansy into them. He attempted any number of things: performing the basic incantations which reverted Transfigured things back into their original forms; dabbing essence of fluxweed on the tops of their heads; even attempting some foolishness with salt and a hand mirror, thinking of his discussion with the fourth years about the nature of counter-curses. He was unsurprised, although still disappointed, when none of these worked.

So instead, he wove, measuring Millie from tip to tail with the measuring tape that Lovegood had loaned him. He wove until his hands began to get stiff and his empty stomach growled, and even then he wove some more. He thought about walking down to the kitchens, or summoning a house-elf and asking for a plate, but it was simpler to let the steady movements of the loom guide his actions instead.

Eventually, however, he was interrupted by the cool _whoosh_ of a Patronus bounding into his room. The ethereal creature spoke in Caleb’s voice. “Hey man, I know you’re up there weaving. Cho and I are bringing you back some lunch from The Three Broomsticks. Meet you in the Entrance Hall in 20 minutes?”

Draco huffed, but finally put down the shuttle and ran his gloved fingertips over the progress he had made. He had barely spoken to Caleb for weeks, as he and Chang were now (in Caleb’s own words) ‘otherwise occupied.’ It would be good to catch up with him briefly, even if Chang would be there giggling and making kissy faces at Caleb and asking Draco when she could finally dig around in his memories.

He threw on a coat and scarf, and went out into the corridor towards the Grand Staircase. On a Sunday in the daytime, there were several students around, and some of them even remembered to identify themselves when greeting him. “Hey, Professor! It’s Maddie from Gryffindor! I’ve been practicing my _Expelliarmus_!” “Hi Professor Malfoy this is Eric and Bethany and Olivia and Javier, okay bye Professor have a good day!”

Draco had not been bothered by the hallway stalker again, but—and this was more strange—he had not heard any gossip about their identity, either. It took some tricky magic to immediately grow back one’s hair after a Ubiquitous Balding Hex, so the student was either a genius who could do Hex-Breaking well above N.E.W.T. level , or they were walking about with a cap pulled low over their bare head and nonexistent eyebrows. Draco felt certain that the person’s identity would come out into the open soon one way or another, and was grateful in the meantime to be able to walk the stairs and corridors with plenty of witnesses about.

He made it down to the Entrance Hall without incident, fairly bouncing on his toes to meet Chang and Caleb (and, if he was being honest, the promised takeaway pub lunch). He remembered that there were a few worn, cosy chairs against one wall and made his way over to them, then sat and waited. It was times like these that he almost wished he could be working on the star-thorn coats on his own, like the Hufflepuffs with their omnipresent knitting in their laps. He waited… and waited some more.

Draco didn’t need to cast a _Tempus_ to know that he had been sitting in the Entrance Hall for more than half an hour. While people had been traipsing back and forth through the hall, none of them had Caleb’s American accent or Chang’s indefatigably cheerful temper—or the scent of cedar or freesias, for that matter. He had sat almost perfectly still for his entire wait, and wished that he’d thought to bring a book for the pendant to read for him; or something to fidget with; or anything to take his mind off why Caleb and Chang had still not appeared.

At last, the waiting grew so wearisome that Draco launched himself out of the chair and made for the castle doors. Perhaps the two of them had got stranded on the way back from Hogsmeade? He wasn’t quite sure what _he_ of all people could do to help them, if that were the case, given his current state, but it was still better than sitting around twiddling his thumbs. He laid his hands on the panelled surface of the massive front door, yanked it open, and stepped outside.

It was absolutely _freezing_. He’d forgotten just how effective the castle’s Warming Charms were, and how they cut off immediately as one stepped over the threshold of the Entrance Hall. It was terribly windy, and judging by the frigid particles that dotted his face, it was snowing too. Draco made to turn around and head back into the castle when several things happened at once.

A huge gust of wind buffeted him from the side, causing him to stumble off balance. In the act of falling, he grabbed the first thing he could reach, which was the handle on the front door, which slammed shut with an enormous _BANG!_ Then Draco lost his grip on the handle and kept spinning, and slipped off the side of the steps, and fell into a snowbank with all the breath knocked out of him.

He lay there, stunned and winded, with wet snow all around him and slowly seeping into his clothes. It had been years since he’d fallen like that, perhaps not since his last Quidditch game as a student. He wasn’t seventeen anymore, that was certain; his body felt heavy and impossible to move, like a sack of stones. After small, experimental movements of his neck and limbs, he determined that he was unhurt and began the long and arduous process of getting back on his feet.

Once he was standing again, however, he wasn’t sure what to do next. The howling wind was disorienting, and the freezing snow had begun to seep through the backs of his trousers and down the neck of his coat and jumper, which didn’t help things at all. Draco took a few steps forward, hoping to encounter the castle’s front steps with his feet or shins. At this point, he wouldn’t have even minded if he’d fallen down upon them again. But he encountered nothing except the crunch of fresh snow underfoot, and an interminable wind which pushed him first in one direction, then another. He began to shiver, and wished he had brought gloves.

Belatedly, he remembered about the pendant, and dug it with shaking fingers from under his coat. But the thing would only say, “Snow,” which was about as unhelpful as it could get. Feeling idiotic, Draco turned around in a slow circle while tapping the pendant, hoping it would identify the castle or the front steps or anything useful. But it continued in its maddening refrain: “Snow. Snow. Snow.”

He was loath to try a _Point Me_ lest the wind whip his wand out of his palm, but he did at least remember to cast a Warming Charm over himself until things got worse. That took off the edge of his shivers, but he couldn’t stand here all night. Should he shout for help, or wait until someone reported him missing? No one in their right minds would be out in this weather, which was probably why Caleb and Chang hadn’t shown up. They were probably huddled together in Hogsmeade, waiting for the squall to pass. Draco’s empty stomach gave a growl at the thought of his promised lunch. It was very difficult to feel warm with nothing in his belly, no gloves, and little hope of rescue.

…Hope…

A proverbial light went on in Draco’s mind, and he drew out his wand after all. He thought of Potter’s laugh and shouted:

_“Expecto Patronum!”_

But nothing happened, not even the barest hint of the rush that Draco had felt before. He blew out a deep breath and thought harder. He imagined Potter catching the Snitch and tried again:

_“Expecto Patronum!”_

Still nothing. If anything, it was _less_ nothing than before, which made no bloody sense. Draco felt like he was shouting into a black hole. Maybe it was the wind.

He gritted his teeth and began to walk, because he was damned if he was going to become a human icicle _and_ fail repeatedly at spellcasting. Hugging his free arm around himself, Draco placed one foot in front of the other and thought of Potter hoisting the House Cup. _“Expecto Patronum.”_ He fluffed up his scarf to try and block out the cold and thought of Potter casting his final spell against the Dark Lord. _“Expecto Patronum.”_

Each repetition seemed to draw something from him, draining him, like he was struggling to keep his head above water. He couldn’t understand why the spell had worked with Potter beside him, but would not work again now. Surely he couldn’t need Potter to hold his hand in order to cast a Patronus; that was a totally banal idea, and anyway it went against everything that had been drilled into him by experts in defensive magical theory. Patronuses relied on internal motivation from the caster. So why was it that the only time he’d been able to cast it, Potter had been right there?

Draco had come close to death several times, but he thought that this was his least favourite of them all: wandering about underdressed in a snowstorm, probably no more than twenty feet from the castle doors but unable to see them, and incapable of casting the only spell he could think of to summon aid. As he attempted the Patronus again and again, his Warming Charms got weaker and weaker, until his hands began to shake again with the cold and exertion.

At last, he came into contact with something solid, and it took his numb fingers several attempts to find a handle and open the small door. His last thought before collapsing was that he hoped Lovegood would remember to feed the snakes, because Theo in particular got cranky when he skipped a meal.

Draco slept, and dreamt.

He dreamt of the Dark Lord’s snake, who had feasted upon Charity Burbage at his family’s dining table and roamed their hallways and shed an enormous skin on the carpet in their corridor. No one had moved it for fear of punishment, and it had remained there—a hollow ghost, a tangible echo—until the day the Aurors had come to evict Draco and his mother from their ancestral home.

He dreamt of the Slytherin Common room, sitting beside the fire with his friends. They were eating, drinking, and idly tossing Astoria’s stuffed rabbit back and forth. But suddenly Theo unhinged his jaw and swallowed the rabbit whole, because it was a real rabbit and then they all were feeding: Millie dangled a field mouse above her mouth and opened wide, and Blaise fished a squirming frog out of his pocket and held it up to his lips, and Draco screamed and looked away.

He dreamt of Potter, except that instead of whispering tender things in Draco’s ear, he hissed; and his forked tongue tickled Draco’s ear in a way that made him want to shrink into a corner and cover the soft, exposed parts of his neck and face. _Malfoy_ , hissed Potter. _Malfoy._

“…Malfoy!”

A burst of cold air jolted Draco into consciousness. He tried to sit up but banged his forehead on something hard, and immediately fell back down again.

“Jesus, Malfoy, what are you doing out here? Your fucking lips are blue. Oh, Merlin.” The door shut and Potter muttered, “God, I can’t see a thing.”

“N-n-n-neither can I,” Draco croaked, laughing deliriously.

Potter swore under his breath but it sounded like he was smiling when he murmured, “ _Lumos_ ,” followed by a Warming Charm. The temperature immediately shifted from bitter to balmy, but the sudden change made Draco’s body shake and convulse. He tried to talk but his teeth were chattering too hard.

Potter cursed again and cast some more spells, this time bringing the temperature of the space to something more mild. Then he Vanished Draco’s wet, freezing clothes all at once.

“Sh-sh-sh-sh-should’ve known you’d find me w-w-when you got lonely,” he said with a delirious laugh.

“It's basic first aid, you knob,” Potter said, and cast another mild Warming Charm on the floor as well as an extra Cushioning Charm. It was carpeted, he realised, as his body responded hungrily to the soft, warm pile beneath him. Then Draco felt Potter lay down beside him and drape his cloak over the both of them.

“W-where…?” he managed.

“It’s one of the school’s Thestral carriages. You know, the ones that take the students between the castle and the train station. How the hell did you get out here, Malfoy?”

“Got l-l-lost.”

“Jesus,” Potter repeated, and drew Draco tightly against him. He was hot like a furnace, like he always was, and Draco wanted nothing more than to take all of Potter’s warmth for himself.

“Closer.”

“Can’t get much closer than this,” Potter half-laughed.

Draco insisted, “Closer,” and moved his hands down. They had been crushed between his and Potter’s chests, but he crept lower and lower until he found the waistline of Potter’s thick woolen jumper. Beneath was a soft t-shirt, and beneath that was delicious, warm skin.

Potter gasped, and Draco felt the muscles beneath his hands contract. “You’re fucking _freezing_.”

“So warm me up,” Draco said, and tilted his head for a kiss.

He didn’t think he would ever get tired of the slide of Potter’s mouth against his. He kissed with his whole body, pressing forward to dip his tongue into Draco’s mouth. His grip shifted; one hand went to the back of Draco’s neck, and the other drifted down to Draco’s waist, twin torches in the frigid space.

Draco moved so that one of Potter’s legs could slide between his. This was an exceptionally good idea because it gave Draco something to move against. He wasn’t sure if rerouting the flow of hot blood through his body was entirely a good idea at the moment, but there was something about being trapped in a carriage in a snowstorm, naked, under a warm cloak with Harry Potter, which all coherent thought fly out the window.

“Fuck,” Potter whispered against his jaw. Draco's fingers were still a bit numb but he got the button of Potter's jeans undone anyway. “How’d you know it was me?”

“What?” Draco muttered, dazed with heat and friction.

“Just now, when I found you.”

“I’d know you anywhere, Potter.” Draco rolled his eyes, then lifted his hips and made them both buck against one another instinctively. “I could pick you out of a crowd blind and upside-down and with both hands tied behind my back.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. One, your voice. Two, you smell like apples and sunlight—” Potter’s bark of laughter was surprisingly loud in the small carriage, “—and three… well, I just would.”

“You just would, huh?” Potter held him in place as he sucked on Draco's earlobe.

“Unh… yes.”

“Anywhere?”

“Anywhere.”

“…Even at the Manor? You knew then?”

Draco stilled. They didn't talk about the war, like they didn't talk about a lot of things. It was basically the least sexy thing he could think of. Why did Potter had to go and ruin a perfectly good frotting? Draco groaned and squeezed Potter’s arse irritably.

“ _Yes_ , especially then. You think I didn’t feel you in the room like a punch in the gut? I’ve never been able to ignore you, Potter. There’s something in me that always needs to chase you. I’d follow you to the ends of the earth on the off-chance you might notice me. It’s been like this for bloody ages. I knew you were no Ravenclaw, but _honestly_.”

Silence rang through the carriage and Draco wondered why. As far as insults went, that hadn’t been so bad, had it?

But Potter said, “Malfoy,” in a broken voice, and kissed him. Draco drew him so close that they were pressed together at every point like a mirror image: foreheads, hands, chests, hips, and knees.

“Closer,” he begged.

“I thought you said— ah—” Potter broke off as Draco rose to savagely kiss the pulse point at his neck, “Thought you said you wanted to wait ‘til you could see me.”

“Only because it’s unfair for you to see me when I can’t see you,” Draco grinned, feeling around on the floor for his wand. “ _Nox_.”

* * *

Their aftermath found them sticky and sore and, in Draco’s case, with a maddening carpet burn since Potter had driven him into the floor past what a simple Cushioning Charm could handle, which was honestly pretty hot. Potter cast a cursory _Scourgify_ and a _Lumos_ and retrieved Draco’s clothes from wherever he’d Vanished them to, and they managed to get dressed without knocking elbows too badly. It took longer than usual because Potter kept getting distracted by Draco shrugging into his shirt with a sharp roll of his shoulders, or sliding his trousers up his slightly aching thighs. “Good grief, Potter,” Draco said, swatting his hand away for the umpteenth time. “We have _two beds_ for this sort of thing. I’ll want a couple of pillows and several items from my bedside drawer if you intend to carry on in this fashion.”

That finally captured Potter’s focus—the man was like an overgrown Crup, _honestly_ —and he cast Warming Charms over them both before they opened the carriage door to walk back to the castle arm-in-arm.

“I feel completely unmoored,” Draco admitted, raising his voice a little to be heard over the howling gale. “Is it four in the afternoon, or midnight? And please tell me we’re miles away from the castle. It would be completely pathetic if I got blown off my feet and completely lost with the front door only a stone’s throw away.”

“Oh, it’s at least two stone’s throws,” Potter laughed when Draco elbowed him in the ribs, “and don’t worry, it’s only half past one.”

“Merlin, I’m _starving_. Can we stop by the kitchens for a sandwich or four on the way up?”

They did, and Draco warmed his hands by the fire while the elves swarmed adoringly around Potter. They sent him away with a picnic basket filled with enough food to feed several Quidditch teams and then some. It took him several attempts to open the door because Draco had begun to wonder aloud whether a Pepper-Up Potion would make a blowjob tingly or not, and then he was pulling Draco inside and dropping the picnic basket with a crash.

“What’s the matter, Potter? So eager to get your hands on me that you can’t—”

Then Draco was crashing too, running into the wingback chair which was several feet away from where it usually was. And on its side.

Several things were wrong, in fact. The carpet was rumpled, and Potter’s footsteps crunched on what sounded like the tinkle of broken porcelain. As Draco took halting steps towards his room, he bumped into another chair, as well as his weaving bench, which had also been knocked aside.

“Decided to redecorate?” he asked lightly, as he knelt to turn the bench upright.

“I— I don’t— I don’t know what’s happened,” Potter stammered. “Everything’s in the wrong…”

Draco’s feet carried him the rest of the way into his bedroom, heedless of the scattered books and clothes that littered the floor. The sense of unease that had been growing inside him flared into full-blown terror as he approached the dresser where the glass tank lived. Seven sets of alarmed hisses greeted him, and the glass was solid and whole under his fingertips, thank Salazar for that. But even as he wrenched open the drawer where the star-thorn coats lived and plunged in both ungloved hands, he knew he would find nothing.

“No, no, nonononono… _Accio star-thorn coats!_ ”

He almost wanted the razor-sharp thorns to come flying at him, would have gladly caught them against his bare skin—but nothing happened.

The coats were gone.


	6. a shot in the dark aimed right at my throat

Draco wondered if there wasn’t some kind of lifelong curse on him to make all his hard-won triumphs tantalisingly short-lived. He couldn’t fathom any other reason why every House Cup victory should be snatched from under Slytherin’s nose at the last minute; why his fifth year should begin with receiving a Prefect’s badge and culminate with his father’s arrest; and why, not an hour after mindblowing sex with the man he’d been dreaming about for half his life, everything should come shattering down around him.

He tried to say as much to Potter, but it all got twisted around on the way out from his heart and over his tongue. It became: “So your wards are shit, apparently,” and “This never would have happened if you hadn’t distracted me,” and “If you wanted to keep me blind and helpless and tied to your side forever, you only needed to say so, Potter, now where are the fucking coats?”

“You think _I_ had something to do with this?”

“Who else would have a reason…? Who would want to—” Draco broke off, sinking onto the edge of his bed, burying his face in his hands. His own voice sounded strange and far away.

“Malfoy, no one has any reason.” Potter knelt in front of him and rested his hands on Draco’s lap. “No one has a vendetta or a grudge against you.”

“Someone does,” Draco insisted hollowly. “Someone wants to see me suffer for as long as possible. They look at me and they see a Death Eater with blood on his hands, and they want to see me pay.”

“No!”

“And you know what?” Draco went on as if Potter hadn't spoken. “They don't think I'm good enough for their Saviour, either. They see us together and they think I've Imperiused you.”

“Where are you getting this?” Potter cried, putting his hands on Draco's knees and shaking gently. “Who's been telling you…?””

“No one has to say it. I know what they all think.” Suddenly it was the summer before eighth year again, and the shopkeepers in Diagon were all ignoring him, and people in the streets were pointing, and his father was in prison and his mother was exiled and he was so alone. The first years sorted into Slytherin sat as far away from him as they could and the professors who'd had relatives killed in the war could barely bring themselves to look at him, let alone call on him in class.

Every insecurity he'd ever feared came roaring up from his past, and he saw himself as an old man, haggard, roaming the corridors with his scarred hands trailing along the walls. _There goes Blind Malfoy_ , they'd whisper loudly. _Legend has it he was cursed a hundred years ago to weave impossible coats out of thorns. His friends are all dead but he keeps at it anyway. And every time he gets close to finishing, the coats disappear…_

“We'll find out what happened. We'll ask McGonagall to help, and Hermione and Luna… we'll find the coats, Malfoy, you know we will.”

Draco knocked Potter’s hands away and stood, breathing hard. There was a curse to be broken, and someone was trying to prevent him from succeeding. They had frightened him when he was alone and vulnerable, and they’d ransacked his rooms. They would use Potter against him, somehow. And he wouldn’t lose Potter _and_ his friends, because then who would he have left?

He stood, _Accio_ d a valise, and began throwing armfuls of clothing into it. He Summoned his toiletries from the bathroom next, and it was a mark of how agitated he was that he didn’t bother separating them from his clothing.

“Stop! Please, what are you doing?” Potter tried to take him by the warm and Draco pushed his hands away.

“What I should have done from the beginning. I’m doing this and I’m doing it alone.”

“Malfoy!” Potter must have slammed his fist against the bedpost, because the mattress beside Draco shook slightly. “You always make everything so goddamn difficult. I’m on your side; I’m here to help you! I can protect you; I can—”

And this was why he couldn’t keep Potter close. He was everything Draco was not: brave and impulsive and heroic and powerful. Draco had thought that with Potter by his side, anything would be possible. Now he saw how foolish he had been.

“I. Don’t. Need. Saving.” He forced the words out through gritted teeth. “If I break this curse, it’s my triumph; and if I fail, it’s my downfall. I know nobody in the history of the world has ever told you this, but not everything is about you, Potter.”

He felt the sting of his words, magnified a hundred times over by the small, hurt noise that came from the back of Potter’s throat. But Draco had made his decision. 

“Now get out of my way. And if you _dare_ to look for me on that bloody map of yours, I swear to Merlin I’ll make you regret it.”

He cast Levitating and Cushioning Charms on the snake tank, turned, and fled the room.

By some minor miracle, he only crashed into three walls on his ensuing furious escape through the castle. Although it was Cushioned, the heavy tank still slammed into his shoulder hard enough to take his breath away, but it was a welcome sort of pain, a reminder that he could still feel when everything else was going numb.

He stalked upstairs without thinking, with no particular destination in mind. It was a minor miracle that he didn’t encounter anyone in the halls, because he would have hexed them without a second thought. He was unravelling, stunned. _I just need somewhere to be alone,_ he wished fervently, and that was when his hand caught on a doorknob. Unthinking, he opened the door.

The room he stumbled into was quiet and warm. It seemed abandoned, but in the way of something loved and then set aside instead of the dusty solitude of a crypt, and it seemed to welcome his presence as it drew him further inside. Draco made a small noise of relief, and his voice bounced back to him from a high ceiling and stone walls.

He extended his hands to feel around, and came into gentle contact with a wooden surface—a desk or table—so he gently set the glass tank on top. He began to make his slow, silent way around the room, and each time he reached out, he found something useful. An armchair set beside a small fire, which was inexplicably lit and crackling. A narrow doorway to a single bathroom with a small but serviceable shower. A bed for one, made up with crisp sheets and a quilt softer than clouds.

The only thing which seemed out of place was an enormous piece of glass set in a gilded and strangely engraved frame; it must have been a mirror. A great help that would be, Draco thought wryly, as he removed his fingertips from the cool, smooth glass and turned away.

Given all the time he’d spent in the Room of Hidden Things in sixth year, Draco was not entirely surprised by the castle providing him with a perfectly-appointed bedroom when he most needed it. It even went so far as to turn down the sheets for him as he collapsed in a heap on the bed. He sneezed three times in quick succession and curled up miserably. It would be just his luck to catch a cold on top of everything. Bloody Potter, bloody snowstorm, bloody fucking curse.

Too dazed and exhausted to allow himself the luxury of tears, Draco curled up and allowed his mind to wander. He couldn’t tell if he actually thought that Potter was involved with the disappearing coats, but he knew it would never have happened if he hadn’t left the room. Caleb, then, or Chang? But that made even less sense. Both of them were helping him to break the curse; why should they do anything to hinder his efforts?

Well, why should Potter, for that matter? Wasn’t he helping too? Didn’t he _want_ to help?

But then Draco remembered that Potter had never told Draco how he felt. Draco hadn’t got a chance to ask to turn the question back on him: when did _you_ know? Do you feel the same way I…? 

Merlin be damned, this was why Draco didn’t _do_ feelings. This was why he’d spent most of his life compartmentalising, fighting, and ignoring any shreds of tenderness which had threatened to undo him. Feelings made a man weak; weaknesses could be exploited; therefore it was best to protect oneself from vulnerability by not feeling at all. Draco could almost hear his father’s voice chanting this oft-repeated wisdom even though the man had been behind bars for almost a dozen years. Maybe Lucius had been right all along.

Draco let out a shuddery breath and shifted on the bed. He was still sore from earlier, and after a moment’s hesitation, he spelled away the bruises and tender spots. There. It would be as if he had never given in and let himself be with Potter. He would start anew, without distractions or help or Harry Potter kissing his neck and pressing his warm palms against the small of Draco’s back and doing his selfless saviour act. The attacker couldn’t take Potter from him if Draco pushed him away first.

No, this time Draco was going to do it his way. He would do it alone.

* * *

It was a simple matter for the house-elves to move the loom and Draco’s clothing and effects without him needing to step into Potter’s quarters again. It was a cowardly move, but no one would expect anything different from a Slytherin, right? When Draco returned from his morning class on Monday, he found the loom set up near the wall beside the immense mirror, along with his dragonhide gloves and basket of star-thorn. Blanching at the idea of slurping soup beside Potter in frigid silence, Draco called a house-elf and asked for a small plate of food and some water. Then he donned the gloves and began his task anew.

The days began to blur together. He ran through lessons with Chang even though it felt like he was floating outside of his own body, listening to a more focused man lecture on jinxes and correct his students’ wand movements. The house-elves continued to bring him food, and he must have eaten it, because the plates always ended up empty; but he barely tasted what he ate. His life condensed down to weaving until his hands began to shake so badly he had to rest; then weaving some more.

He finished Daphne’s coat, then began to work on the cloth for Theo’s. He didn’t harbor any real hope that the first four coats would be recovered, but it somehow felt like too much to admit total defeat and make Astoria’s, Greg’s, Pansy’s, and Millicent’s all over again. Besides, he hadn’t spent too much time with Daphne as yet, and she seemed happy enough to wind gently around his neck as he guided the shuttle over the loom in endless repetition.

Lovegood found him, of course. She approached him on Tuesday—their usual feeding day—after his afternoon class and quietly offered her elbow for guidance. Then she followed him without comment to his new quarters and fed the snakes with no comment on his relocation or Solitary Salamanders or anything of the sort.

Caleb was next. On the pretext of meeting Chang at the end of Defence class, he came over to where Draco was stacking the practice mats and pressed something into his hand. Through the hastily-wrapped napkin, Draco detected the distinct aroma of something warm, freshly baked, and filled with cinnamon sugar. “Hope you’re doing okay, man,” Caleb murmured, and seemed to understand when Draco couldn’t respond around the massive and sudden lump in his throat.

After that was Longbottom, who caught him by the teapot in the staffroom and handed him a slim book with one page dog-eared. “That’s the chapter on the _Ferula_ spell. It simulates the white cane that blind Muggles use for mobility. And I should have some more star-thorn for you in a day or two,” he said all in a rush, before heading off to teach.

Draco did not encounter Potter once, not even passing him in a corridor. He would have sensed his unmistakable presence as always, but his heartstrings remained decidedly untugged. Doubtlessly Potter was using his map to find ways around the castle which were outside of Draco’s path. Honestly, Draco was unsure what he would do if Potter tried to speak to him despite his threats. He was so drained that any hex he attempted would probably fizzle out, like the _Crucio_ he’d aimed at Potter all those years ago. So that was a plus.

At times he wondered, _What have I done to deserve this?_ , but he knew what he’d done—he knew the list of his sins as well as he knew his own name. He dwelled on them while he wove, taking a perverse satisfaction in reopening those old wounds. It gave his mind something to focus on as he threaded the brittle strands of star-thorn back and forth, back and forth.

One day, he heard two boys discussing their current Muggle Studies project while they were waiting to face a tank of Chang’s Ministry-procured Grindylows. “Professor Potter’s seemed kind of weird this week, huh? Did you notice in class today that he was just staring out the window?”

“Yeah. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, either.”

“Winchester and Nguyen, twenty points from Ravenclaw,” Draco snarled. “You will use my class time to discuss my class topics and nothing else, is that understood?” He swept off with an uneasy, twisting feeling in his gut.

That was the breaking point for Chang, who grabbed him by the arm at the end of class when he tried to slink back to his room. “Hey,” she hissed. “We need to talk.”

Draco tried to shake off her grip, but to his irritation, she squeezed harder. “I don’t see that we have anything to discuss. The third years need to put some serious effort towards their _Relashio_ technique. They’re all Dreadful at the moment, but I think they could get up to Acceptable if—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.” Chang gave his arm a little shake. “What are you doing about the curse? You and Harry both skipped yesterday’s meeting, and I have no idea what happened between you—okay, Caleb and I have a _bit_ of an idea—but you can’t just hole up alone in your room like this. You’ve got to let me look at your memories from that night so we can sort this out. We’re here to help you, Draco. We all want to help.”

Draco thought of Elisa, weaving nettles in mute solitude for her cursed brothers. She had seemed so heroic, so brave. In the rare childhood moments when he’d dreamt of being a hero, he always stood alone on that pedestal. _I alone did this. Me, me, me._

So why was it that every night this week, he had dreamt of warm arms around him, and phantom kisses on his neck and face, and a quiet voice whispering, _I’m with you however long this takes, and beyond. I’m with you_?

He gave a shattered-sounding sigh and slumped against a nearby desk. “Fine. Next week, maybe? We can meet in the—”

“ _Legilimens!_ ”

Oh, how disappointed Aunt Bella would have been at seeing her nephew so easily caught off guard. Everything she had taught him about Occlumency and mental defence flew out the window at Chang’s surprise attack. Draco found himself flying along as she plunged into his memory with the powerful and effortless precision of a professional.

It was like a malfunctioning Muggle film of his own life, and Draco gasped because he saw what Chang saw—he _saw_. He watched eleven-year-old Draco lift his cheek for his mother’s kiss at King’s Cross, and twelve-year-old Draco enter Borgin and Burkes alongside his father, and Draco of this summer shake hands with a devastatingly gorgeous man who said, “Hey, I’m Caleb Perez. Nice to meet you.” There was a slight jerk in his mind at that, like Chang losing focus; but before Draco could react, she kept on diving.

A flurry of images overlaid one another in his mind, each happening simultaneously—a Snitch flittering, a Hippogriff screeching, a chandelier crashing—before Chang found what she was looking for, and thrust it to the forefront of Draco’s mind for a better look. He watched, as if through a pair of Omnioculars, as memory-Draco sat in front of the Floo hearth and turned the pages of a book…

***

_…that he had been having trouble focusing on. It had been an absolutely interminable supper. Potter had been telling Lovegood about his fourth year class using electricksity for the first time; she laughed so hard her hat fell into her soup, and Draco tried not to stare too obviously from his spot further along the table. Irritably, he shut the book and took a sip of elf-made wine. It was the middle of October and the flames brought his rooms up to a comfortable temperature, although he still snuggled gladly into his dark blue quilted dressing gown._

 _The Floo chimed before Pansy’s face appeared in the flames. The image was a bit fuzzy and her voice was faint, although her stylish black bob was unmistakable._ (From his removed spot watching the memory alongside Chang, Draco drank in the sight of his best friend’s face with a miserable pang of yearning.)

_“Hello! Hello? Draco, is that you?”_

_Draco slid from his chair into a seated position on the hearthrug. “Who were you hoping for, Pansy? Oliver Wood? You know, you can only ‘accidentally’ misdial his Floo so many times before his fiancée files a complaint with the Ministry.”_

_“Shut it, you.” Pansy wrinkled her nose at him. “That was _once_ and I was smashed. I had just closed the Andover-van der Stadt case, do you remember? Oh, that’s right, you were ‘unavailable’.”_

_“I was taking my final apprenticeship exams, you absolute cow.”_

_“Excuses, excuses.” They smiled fondly at one another through the green flames._

_“How are you? How’s Vienna?”_

_“Gorgeous, very fun, although the food does leave something to be desired.” Pansy made a face. “It’s all meat and potatoes.”_

_“As opposed to your beloved English cuisine which is… also meat and potatoes?”_

_“It’s different and you know it. Speaking of England, darling, what are you doing on Halloween?”_

_He shrugged. “We’ve the feast at school, but no plans afterwards. It’s not like I’m going to dress up like a ghoul and knock on doors for sweets. Why?”_

_“Well, I was just thinking. I’m due for some leave and I know Blaise will be in town to see his mum. How would it be if we came up to see you?”_

_Draco leaned forward so quickly his nose almost touched the green flames. “Really?” he asked eagerly. His friends had been scattered around Britain and beyond for so long that at times, it felt like he was the only Hogwarts professor who didn’t have regular visitors. The prospect of seeing Pansy and Blaise for the first time in years made his heart swell with hope._

_“Sure. We’ll pick up Greg and Millie on our way through London. And aren’t Daphne and Astoria in Cambridge now?”_

_“No, you’re thinking of Theo.”_

_“Splendid! We’ll bring them all, get the gang back together. It’s been far too long since we had a proper Slytherin party, don’t you say?”_

_“Oh, Pans.” Draco tried not to let his enthusiasm show on his features. He was sure he was failing miserably. Gone were the days when they could gather at the Greengrasses’ flat for cocktails and gossip, or go down to the pub and swap stories their love lives and careers. If he’d known how lonely it would be to start careers and live their lives hours apart from one another, Draco might not have ever let them leave the Slytherin Common Room._

_Pansy must have spied a hint of what was going through his head, because her expression nearly verged on tender. “You’re so softhearted sometimes,” she said kindly. “Speaking of which. How’s Potter?”_

_Vicious bitch. Draco’s cheeks warmed before he could shield himself against the riposte, and Pansy’s dark eyes sparkled. “Still the Champion Of All That Is Noble And Good. Still needs a haircut. My sixth year students are obsessed with his childhood exploits.”_

_“So you should be able to advise them from personal experience, then.”_

_“You are_ dreadful _, you know.”_

_“And_ you _are twenty-nine years old. You ought to have the nerve to tell Potter you’d like to shag him on every piece of furniture in the castle. Twice.”_

_“What, like a_ Gryffindor _?!” Draco’s heart leapt. He couldn’t help a nervous glance towards the door, although the chances of Potter manifesting at the sound of his name were slim to none. “No thanks.”_

_“You can’t keep mooning after him in silence for the rest of your life, Draco. You’ll have white hair and liver spots and_ still _be sorting the jinxed love letters out of his mailbox, and telling me it’s a public service and not your own stupid heart.”_

_Merlin, he never should have told her about that. “Malfoys do not_ moon _. I say, if I’d known you were going to subject me to verbal abuse, I wouldn’t have answered the Floo.”_

_“Just think about it,” Pansy urged him. “Otherwise, your seven best friends might_ accidentally _let something slip on our next visit to the castle. I’m thinking a subtle note in his coffee, or maybe a ‘MALFOY LOVES POTTER’ banner hung up in his classroom. Or better yet, above his bed…”_

_“You wouldn’t dare!”_

_“Darling, two decades of your Potter-centric ramblings would have driven a weaker woman to madness.” Pansy puckered her lips at his mulish expression. “I just want to see you happy. You should either find someone else to have some fun with, or get around to declaring your undying devotion for Potter. Either way, you’ll never know if you don’t try. Hasn’t it been too, too long?”_

_It had. Draco was no closer to a fulfilling love life now than he was seven years ago, and wasn’t_ that _a sobering thought. He snuggled into his dressing gown with a pout._

_“I am happy. I_ am _,” he insisted, when Pansy quirked an eyebrow at him. “Believe me, Pansy, I’ve too much on my plate. Teaching and research keep me quite busy. I certainly don’t have time to run around declaring my feelings for Potter like some kind of mawkish troubadour.”_

_Pansy fixed him with a stare which suggested that that was_ exactly _what he ought to be doing, but mercifully, she allowed the subject to drop. In a few moments, Draco’s shoulders had relaxed and his head had tipped back in easy laughter. His ongoing obsession with Potter faded back to where it had lived most of his life: safe in a corner of his heart, a flame banked at a low heat which nonetheless threatened to scorch him at any moment…_

***

Chang pulled out of the memory with considerably more care than she had shown going into it. She sifted around for a bit before finding Draco’s memory of Halloween night, and while she viewed it, Draco hung along alongside her, lost in thought. He barely spared a glance for memory-Draco, who cast a careless _Alohomora_ at Filch’s office door. He couldn’t bring himself to watch Daphne and Millie, tipsy and smiling as they scrutinised the framed photographs on the office walls.

His thoughts were consumed by his conversation with Pansy. He wished he had just kept his heart, his feelings, and his dick to himself. There was a Potter-shaped hole in his life now that Draco had let him in, and—as with all things Potter—it seemed impossible that anything else should compare.

Draco knew that he’d been wrong to lash out, that he was irrationally blaming Potter for the theft. And it was also silly to claim that he’d acted in the interest of saving Potter from some horrible fate at the hands of some silent stalker. _Really._ The thought of _Draco Malfoy_ saving Harry Bloody Potter was, quite frankly, laughable.

(He refused to listen to the echo in his mind of Potter asking, soft and careful: “Even at the Manor? You knew then?”)

He watched numbly as memory-Theo reached into Filch’s filing cabinet. There was a blinding flash of light and memory-Draco fell to the floor of Filch’s office. And then there was the sound of seven voices hissing, a harsh and sibilant sound which rattled his nerves. Draco was greatly relieved when Chang released her hold on his mind and he came swimming back shakily into the here and now.

“Bloody hell, woman,” he breathed.

Chang made an unapologetic noise. “You have nothing to complain about. I think that’s the complete poem! It certainly sounds longer than what I was able to get from Pansy. I’ll extract a copy of my memory for Harry.” And when Draco frowned at the mention of his name, she insisted, “You have to sort this out with him eventually, you know.”

Draco bristled. “I don’t _have to_ do anything.”

“Suit yourself.” Chang rustled around, gathering up her things. “I don’t need to be a Legilimens to see how miserable he is, though.”

“I fail to see how that concerns me. He’s never said anything to indicate—” he broke off, biting his lip. It must be desperate times indeed if he was about to pour his heart out to a Ravenclaw, of all people. Salazar, how he missed Pansy and Blaise.

“Of course he hasn’t! He’s Harry!” Chang gave a sharp laugh. “He’s got more courage and power than he knows what to do with, but he couldn’t articulate his way out of a Flobberworm cage. You remember how I dated him for a split second?”

“How could I forget?” Draco snarled quietly.

Chang made a sound which sounded very much like she was snorting and trying not to smile. “Well, I can tell you pretty conclusively, we didn’t do a lot of talking. And before you make that face, all I mean—” and here she jiggled his arm so that the look of despair shifted into a scowl of annoyance, “—is that he prefers actions and grand gestures over talking things out. If you’re waiting for him to say, definitively, ‘Draco Malfoy, I fancy you to pieces and would do anything for you,’ you’ll be waiting for the rest of your life.

“But he’s had this particularly Gryffindor look about him for the past week. I’ll bet you a hundred Galleons you’ve got a Harry Potter Patented Grand Gesture coming your way.”

“No,” Draco moaned, even as his heart gave a thrilled squirm in the confines of his ribcage.

“Fine, five hundred Galleons.” Chang opened the classroom door with an air of finality. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when he sweeps you off your feet. Later!”

* * *

He had to say that roaming the halls with Potter liable to swoop down on him at any moment was even more nerve-racking than the idea of being accosted by his assailant again. Years of professional defensive training had honed his reflexes for hexing and jinxing to an absolute science. But the very idea of Potter still made his insides go all floaty, which turned his spellwork to absolute rubbish.

It really didn’t help that last night was Thursday, so a soft knock had sounded late at night when he was working on the fabric for Theo’s coat. He’d waited a long time before getting up to open the door, knowing that he would find a fresh basket of star-thorn waiting outside. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted Potter to defy his threats and come talk to him, and whether he was imagining the vague scent of apples outside his door as if someone had stood there for a while, waiting and listening and chewing his nails.

Following his afternoon classes, Draco heard the approach of a female voice humming abstractedly, so was forewarned when Lovegood said, “Hello, Draco. How are you?”

He gave a lopsided shrug which he hoped would convey the depth of his numb exhaustion, useless pining over Potter, and general despondency. She seemed to understand, because she nudged the back of his hand gently with hers so that he could take her elbow instead of using the walls as a guide. Merlin, was he getting sick of the feel of stone walls beneath his hands. By the time he was done, he expected a permanent indentation in the walls right about the height where his hands had been sliding along them.

“I was thinking of going down to the kitchens. I’m all out of earl grey tea and…” ( _it’s not the same as when Potter makes it for me_ ), “…and I wanted to see if the elves would give me some.”

“May I come with you?”

“Yes, but let’s avoid that corner by the second-floor sculptures, please. It’s been sticky for weeks, ever since someone spilled an Elixir of Adhesion there. I have no idea why Filch hasn’t cleaned it up.”

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” Lovegood asked. “He’s been unwell. It’s the oddest thing; he lost all of his hair suddenly and Poppy has no idea why. He’s off to St Mungo’s today for special treatment.”

Draco froze in mid-step, letting his hand slide out of Lovegood’s guiding elbow. He blinked rapidly, out of instinct, as his mind began to whirl. “…What did you say?”

Lovegood paused and turned to face him. “Argus’ hair just disappeared about a week ago. His eyebrows, too. It didn’t fall out, it just… _poof_. I only overheard because I was up in the Hospital Wing for more Skrewt Serum, and Poppy was telling him—”

Draco reached out, found her hand again, and clasped it tight. “Lovegood. We’ve got to go to the Hospital Wing, right away.”

It was less a run and more of a guided stumble, since Lovegood was so much shorter than him. But Draco’s free hand glided along the bannisters and against the walls to keep him oriented as they went. Not for the first time, he wished it were possible to Apparate within the castle.

Breathing hard, they dashed down the last corridor and Lovegood shoved the doors open ahead of them. Over the roaring in his ears, he barely heard her say, “Oh, hello Harry,” as they barged through.

“Filch!” Draco shouted, and heard a sharp intake of breath across the large room.

“Professor Malfoy, what is the meaning of this?” Pomfrey’s shoes clicked against the floor as she strode towards them.

“We need to speak to Argus, Poppy,” Lovegood said.

“Well certainly, but—”

“The coats,” blurted Potter, who had come up beside Draco and was standing just out of reach. The barely-there proximity made the hairs on Draco’s arms stand up.

“Yes, _thank you_ Potter,” Draco snipped, although he couldn’t find it in him to be truly rude to Potter at the moment. Not when there was a chance he could finally have not one, but several of his questions answered.

Lovegood led him forward and guided his hand onto the metal rail at the foot of one cot. He heard heavy breathing from the bed; ragged and dark. It sent a frisson of unease through Draco as he remembered how that sound had pursued him down those empty corridors.

Rather than waste time asking _why_ , he simply said: “Where are the coats, Filch?”

“Hidden,” the custodian replied, and he had the audacity to chuckle. “You can break into my office, boy, but you don’t know everything. Not by a mile. Yerssse, I know this castle better than anybody, and you’ll _never_ find them.”

Draco’s wand was drawn and pointed before Filch finished speaking. He blamed the curse for wreaking merry havoc on his nerves; and also Potter, whose act-first-think-later Gryffindorishness must have rubbed off on him. Barely managing to keep his voice steady, he said to Filch, “We’re talking about seven lives. Seven human lives at stake. Are you asking me to choose between saving my friends and sparing your miserable existence? Because if so, you’d better make _damned_ sure your coffin’s bought and paid for.”

“Professor Malfoy!” cried Pomfrey, which only served to make Draco grip his wand even tighter.

“Yerssse, young Mister Mayfield,” said Filch, and Draco furrowed his brow. “That’ll teach you and your rowdy friends to break into my office! Not feeling too sly now, are you? I’ll have Headmaster Dippet in here faster than you can say Stinkbombs! Lifelong detention, I say!” His wild cackle echoed around the quiet Hospital Wing.

“Headmaster… Dippet?” Slowly, Draco lowered his arm.

“He’s cracked,” murmured Potter, at the same time as Lovegood said, “This is the worst case of Wrackspurts I’ve ever seen.”

The Hospital Wing doors opened again, and several others approached. “We just got Harry’s Patronus. What’s happened?” Chang asked.

In the bed, Filch was continuing to laugh to himself, a horrible grating sound which set Draco’s teeth on edge. He turned away with a huff as Potter and Lovegood explained. Chang quickly wove her Legilimency through Filch’s fractured thoughts, then surfaced after the blink of an eye pronouncing, “Fourth floor, under that loose tile by the Transfiguration classroom.”

“I’ll go,” Lovegood volunteered, and the quick tapping of footsteps carried her away. Draco meandered over to what he hoped was an empty hospital cot and sat down heavily. He felt the air shift as Potter approached.

“Hey.”

His nerves frayed and wand arm shaking, Draco managed a small hum in response.

The thin mattress dipped when Potter sat down, a little too far away to be called _next to_ him. “Are you… Have you…”

Draco privately thought that it was a good thing Potter hadn’t got into politics, or else the _Prophet_ would be blazing headlines like _Head Auror Potter Sets Brevity Record With Three-Word Speech_.

“What do you want, Potter?” he asked in one exhausted breath.

Potter didn’t speak. Instead, he crept his hand along the coarse blanket covering the cot until his fingers barely brushed Draco’s. It was a silent entreaty, and in a language they could both speak. No obscuring his own thoughts behind long-winded tangents and prickly asides; none of Potter’s green-eyed and significant _looks_ which he’d caught so many glimpses of, before.

Draco swallowed. He hooked one of his fingers over one of Potter’s, calloused and warm. Then he slowly slipped his hand around so that their palms were touching. And once he began the process, Potter completed it, twining all their fingers together firmly so that it was not the polite clasp of a guide. It was the inseparable hold of two people who meant something to each other, who had hurt each other in the distant past and the not-so-distant past and might do so again, but who chose each other despite everything. Because sense and reason even their tumultuous pasts couldn’t stand a chance against the way his heart felt like it was opening every time Potter drew near—

“Oh my god, get a room,” Caleb crowed, sounding smug and absolutely thrilled.

“Shut _up_ ,” Potter and Draco said in unison, which only elicited a delighted laugh from their colleague. Potter squeezed their held hands and Draco did his best not to glow.

Lovegood returned shortly with an oilskin cloth-wrapped bundle in her hands, and laid it gently in his lap. “Here you are. All four of them. And they're whole and no worse for the wear.” Draco squeezed the bundle carefully to distract him from how wobbly he suddenly felt.

“Thanks, Luna. Thank you, Cho,” said Potter, and Draco nodded his mute and heartfelt agreement.

When the Healers from St Mungo's arrived, they escorted Filch away—first to attempt to restore his hair, and then to consider him for admission to the Janus Thickey Ward. With a regretful sigh, McGonagall recruited Chang, Lovegood, and Caleb to help her gather his belongings, leaving Draco with Potter in the Hospital Wing.

“Things aren’t the same without you,” Potter muttered into the silence, sounding as if he was scratching the back of his neck. Draco's heart thumped painfully. “All Luna talks about are Plimpy infestations, and I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally tried to take Neville by the hand.”

Draco cleared his throat before saying, “I disprefer using the pendant to navigate. It's clumsy and it doesn't know the difference between an anjou pear and a bosc. I nearly had the fright of my life the other night, biting into a mealy old anjou.” He shuddered.

Potter sounded like he was smiling. “I couldn’t tell you the difference between pears either.”

“Yes, but you’re different.” Draco scuffed his foot on the tiled floor. “I miss the way you insist on describing plates of food as if they’re clocks.”

“I miss reading my students’ incorrect quiz answers to you while you weave.”

“I miss you distracting me from my weaving.”

“Let’s get out of here?”

“Yes, let’s.”

Handing the bundle of coats to Potter for safekeeping, Draco led him swiftly out of the Hospital Wing and back to his little single room on the fifth floor.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” Potter said, his voice moving as he wandered around. “It’s pretty cosy.”

“It’s all right,” said Draco, though truth be told, he had grown rather fond of the room. “Will you put the coats on top of the loom, please? It’s on the wall beside the mirror.”

“Mirror?”

“Yes, it was here when I arrived.” The shifting sounds of heavy fabric indicated that Potter was brushing aside the cloaks and coats Draco had hung from its corners. The mirror was of no real use to him as anything but a coat rack. When Potter didn’t speak, Draco went on, “It’s funny—this place is a bit like the Room of Requirement and it gave me everything I needed, along with the biggest mirror in the castle. Not sure why.”

Potter still didn’t respond, so Draco felt his way across the room until he bumped into him, warm and solid and the perfect height for Draco to stand behind him so that Potter’s messy hair barely tickled his nose. “Too busy admiring your own reflection to bother with me anymore, hm, Potter?”

When Potter finally spoke, his voice was a broken whisper. “I haven’t seen this mirror in a really long time.” Draco felt him lift his arm, tracing the frame.

“Oh no. Don’t tell me this is _another_ one of those arcane enchanted artefacts you had to help you defeat the Dark Lord.”

Potter scratched the back of his neck.

“Ugh! You’re insufferable! How can anyone stand a chance against you?” Draco jostled him lightly, and finally got a little laugh out of him. “Next I'll find out that your stupid invisibility cloak is _actually_ one of the Deathly Hallows or something.”

“No comment. Now are you gonna keep whinging or let me tell you what I see?”

“Go on, then.”

Potter took a deep breath. “I see… us.”

Draco waited for Potter to elaborate. He didn’t.

“Well, that’s lovely, Potter. I’m glad it’s a functioning mirror and your beautiful bottle-green eyes work as well as they ought to. Can we move on now?” Draco ducked down to kiss the back of his neck. Salazar, he’d missed the way Potter smelled.

“No, wait. I’m trying to tell you something,” Potter protested with a small laugh. Then he turned in the circle of Draco’s arms and spoke intently, as if he was quoting somebody. “ _The happiest man on earth would be able to use the Mirror of Erised like a normal mirror. He would look into it and see himself exactly as he is._ And I do. I see myself with you beside me.”

Draco blinked, open-mouthed, and cast about for something to say. Potter was far from the most eloquent man in the world, but sometimes the things he _did_ say had a way of driving everything else out of Draco’s mind. His heart, which had previously been straining against his ribcage as if to try and get closer to Potter, was now positively _thrashing_.

He swallowed, his throat quite dry. “Was I… Could I see?”

“What?” Potter sounded lost. “I mean, I don’t know if it will show me what you…”

“No, I mean.” Draco frowned. “The Malfoy you saw in the mirror. Could he see?”

“Er. I don’t know. You were holding the book, though.”

“What book?”

“Oh, shit! The book!”

Draco gave an enormous eyeroll as Potter shuffled about. It sounded like he was going through his pockets. He must have found what he was looking for, because he cast an _Engorgio_ and sat himself and Draco down on the narrow bed.

He lifted Draco’s hands and placed something into them: a small book, clothbound. Draco put it in his lap and ran his hands over it. The front was embossed with the title, and there was a soft ribbon built in to the binding to mark one’s page. It felt oddly familiar, though Draco didn’t recall any of his Defence texts having a cloth binding.

“What’s the point of buying me a book, Potter? You know I can’t stand the pendant’s reading voice.”

“I didn’t buy it,” Potter corrected him. “I… picked it up. It was already yours.”

Draco frowned. “I don’t—”

Potter gently placed his hands over Draco’s and opened the book. There was a particular smell to it, a nostalgic and pleasant old paper smell, which tugged gently at Draco’s memory.

Before he could ask again, Potter guided his fingertips to the bookplate on the inside of the cover, and Draco gasped softly. He knew the peeling corner of this bookplate, recognised the curled edge of it and how it felt beneath his hands.

He knew that it was printed with an enchanted dragon sketched in green ink, which flew around the borders of the little card and behind the space where a young boy had written his name. The training quill had dug into the thick stationery, and he hadn’t quite mastered which way the R went yet, so the bookplate read:

ex libris  
DЯACO MALFOY

He raised his chin to face Potter, shaking his head in disbelief. “How…?”

“It was that weekend I went to visit Andromeda and Teddy,” Potter confessed. “I asked if she remembered giving you a book of fairy tales when you were young. It turns out that when the Manor was seized, all the possessions got stuck in a vault which was signed over to Teddy. So we took a trip to Gringotts and got it. But then I couldn’t find you in our rooms and I had to go out in the storm to look for you…” Potter had to break off, since in the span of half a heartbeat, Draco’s face had shifted from flabbergasted astonishment to a sort of crumpled, overwhelmed joy. He had never been on the receiving end of a Harry Potter Grand Gesture before, and he had to say that it left him rather speechless.

With trembling hands, Potter carefully turned the pages to where the frayed ribbon lay. “‘Elisa and the Swans,’” Potter read aloud, barely above a whisper. “‘Once upon a time, in a castle far, far away, there lived a kind old king. He had six sons and a young daughter whose name was Elisa. She was clever and kind and—mmm!”

He was forced to stop because Draco gently closed the book, set it aside, took Potter by the shoulders, and hauled him in for a kiss. One kiss became several kisses, and as Draco shoved Potter down onto the bed so he could straddle him and fumble at the clasp of his cloak, he said against Draco’s ear, “It’s an okay present, then?”

Draco had worried that the bed would be too small for both of them to sleep in, but he decided he would fret about it later. For the moment, kneeling over Potter offered a perfect position from which to unzip his ridiculous Muggle hoodie, untuck his shirt, and slide his hands over the warm skin of his waist. Draco breathed his adoration and gratitude into every frantic kiss, and they fit together perfectly.

* * *

Draco resolved to give each and every one of the Hogwarts house-elves a box of Cloudberry Creams for Christmas. Perhaps two boxes. And monogrammed jumpers. He felt rather bashful asking them to move all of his belongings _back_ into the rooms he had vacated earlier that week, but they all bowed and scraped and chattered, “Yes sir, of course sir, anything for the special friend of Mister Harry Potter,” and then he had to hide his burning face in the crook of Potter’s arm while the speccy git laughed uproariously over ‘special friend.’

Potter was doubly pleased to have Draco back because he had gone shopping in Muggle London with Andromeda and Teddy, and had come back with a bag of purchases from a stationery shop. Draco was confused and a bit ticked off—what good would bloody stationery do him at the moment?—until Potter showed him how the ‘rubberbans’ and Muggle Spellotape could be used to put tactile markers on his toiletry bottles. “That way, you won’t mix up your hair stuff with your aftershave anymore. I know they smell exactly the same.”

“Bergamot does not, in any way, shape, or form, smell exactly the same as lemon. What is _wrong_ with you?”

“You’re a fop, you know that? An actual, literal 17th century bloke with a powdered wig and your collection of _cufflinks_ and your—”

At this point, Draco dunked Potter forcibly under the fragrant bathwater, because by Salazar, he would not stand idly by while his fragrance decisions were denigrated by a man who smelled like common apple pie. And then their bubbly wrestling and shoving turned into something else entirely, and the issue was laid aside for the moment.

Lunch that Wednesday was pizza again (ugh). Potter and Chang both took the piss out of him for eating it with a knife and fork while Caleb laughed, and Potter had his ankle hooked around Draco's under the table, and everything seemed all right. Until Lovegood Levitated the Pensieve in, and he remembered why they were there. Not even the triumph of finishing Theo’s coat that morning could lighten Draco’s suddenly apprehensive mood.

Chang handed the vial of Draco's Halloween memory to Potter, who got up and walked around the table towards the Pensieve. Once again, Draco waited in nervous silence while Potter plunged his head into the basin, wrote down his translation on a piece of parchment, then repeated the process twice more. The pizza had turned to lead in Draco's stomach by the time Potter cleared his throat and read the verse which they now knew by heart:

Seek thou out in deathly lands  
The thorn whose flowers starlike bloom  
Weave thou cloth with thine own hands  
And garb the damned against their doom

But this time, there was a new bit in the middle:

Clan leader, grant the snakes their coats  
By the winter solstice dawn  
Where the earth and water meet  
And thine troubles shall be gone

And then to conclude:

If thou failst, the cursèd all  
Will live their lives as serpentkind  
And thou, O Failed Champion—  
Evermore shalt thou be blind

The room fell silent as they digested the new information.

Granger was the first to speak. “Did it say, ‘by the winter solstice dawn’?”

“That's Sunday at 4:19 a.m.,” said Lovegood. After the surprised pause from the rest of the group, she elaborated, “Nargles are always quite restless around the solstice.”

“Do you think you’ll have the last coat done by then?” Chang asked.

Draco nodded, trying to fight down the panic that was clawing its way up his spine. Four nights. If he wove day and night… Well, he’d have to, wouldn’t he? There was no other choice.

“‘Where the earth and water meet,’ so we should do it by the lake—” Potter was saying.

“I’ll ask Neville to come along, and make it a nice, round seven,” Lovegood mused. “Seven is a very auspicious number.”

“And I’ll bring the _Serpens Obumbratio_. It seems like a good idea to have it on hand,” said Granger.

“Just a bloody moment,” Draco interrupted, banging his trembling palms flat on the staffroom table. “This isn’t a little Hogsmeade outing! It does specify that the ‘clan leader’ should be the one performing the counter-curse, doesn’t it?”

“What, and you’re going to carry a glass tank of seven snakes, seven thorn coats, and a figurine down to the lake, all alone, without slipping on the icy path or getting lost?” asked Caleb, ever so kindly.

“And ditch your Ministry-appointed Curse-Breaker?” Granger added, smiling.

“Yeah, nice try.” For once, Potter sounded as if he was in full agreement with Caleb. “Face it, Malfoy. You can’t get rid of us that easily.”

Draco huffed and sat back in his seat as Lovegood began to pontificate upon the most appropriate snacks to consume on the solstice. He wondered what Pansy and Blaise would have to say once they discovered that he’d befriended several infuriatingly earnest members of Dumbledore’s Army in his Slytherin compatriots’ absence.

He supposed he’d find out soon enough. The solstice was four nights away.


	7. darkest before the dawn

The night was still and cold, and the snow muffled everything like a shroud. Seven sets of footsteps crunched on the frozen ground, but the soft hoots of owls and rustle of tree branches were oddly muted.

As planned, Caleb and Cho led the way, casting _Lumos_ to illuminate the path down to the lake for the six of them using their eyes. Behind them was Granger with the _Serpens_ , and Lovegood and Longbottom followed with the snake tank under several Warming Charms. Potter and Draco brought up the rear, and Draco held the bundle of star-thorn coats in his free arm.

He had barely slept the last few nights, weaving like his life depended on it. He supposed that it sort of did. Thank Merlin that the students were gone for the winter holidays; who knew what he would’ve done if he’d had to _teach_ on top of everything else?

It was nothing short of a miracle that Draco had finished Blaise’s coat after supper. The brittle star-thorn had broken and snapped in his shaking grip, and it was not so much a coat as it was a vine tube held together with thread and a prayer. For Draco had prayed—not in any religious sense, but, as with all counter-curses, holding the thought of restoring his friends to their rightful forms in his mind as he wove. He envisioned Greg and Millicent beside each other in the kitchen at their successful restaurant; Daphne and Theo exchanging heated looks across a crowded room; Pansy throwing her head back and laughing.

After finishing Blaise’s coat, he’d been too agitated to even feign sleep, so he and Potter sat up by the fire, their tea growing cold as Potter rubbed his shoulders and attempted to soothe him.

“Is this how you felt before the Triwizard Tournament and facing Dementors and killing the Dark Lord?” Draco asked, running his gloved fingers over the coats for the trillionth time.

“Pretty much.”

“Good grief.”

“Mmhm.” Potter took Draco’s hands softly. “C’mon, take off your gloves and just lie down with me for a sec. If you won’t sleep, you could at least stop fidgeting.”

“Never,” Draco replied automatically, but he complied anyway. Tucked against Potter on their sofa, he tried not to think about everything that could go awry. For instance, what if Potter hadn’t translated the poem correctly? Would the lake fulfill the setting of ‘where the earth and water meet,’ or should they travel to the seaside? What if the coats were all wrong and he needed to make little snake caps as well? What if Filch had altered the coats in some way and he wouldn’t notice until it was too—

“Can you read to me?” he said suddenly.

“Hm?” Potter sounded drowsy.

“Please. Anything. I’m overthinking things and…” Draco trailed off, pillowing his head in the crook of his elbow on Potter’s chest.

Potter shifted beneath him before saying, “ _Accio_ fairy tale book,” and catching it nimbly as it soared into his hand. He turned the pages thoughtfully, then began to read in a soft, even voice. “‘This is the story of Rapunzel. Once upon a time there was a woodcutter and his wife, who lived in a small house high on a hill…’”

Draco drifted somewhere between wakefulness and rest while Potter read and sifted his fingers through Draco’s hair. The familiar stories of true love, daring rescues, and noble sacrifices had helped to pass the time. And as he walked hand-in-hand with Potter towards the frozen lake, Draco could almost imagine that he was a hero too. Briefly, he imagined someone writing books and stories about him and Potter, and almost laughed at the absurd thought.

Chang and Granger led the way to a spot by the water where several flat stones provided seats and resting places. Despite everyone’s overlapping Warming Charms, a frigid wind cut sharply straight across the lake and crept beneath their coat collars and under their knitted hats. Draco donned the thick dragonhide gloves for protection against both the thorns and the cold.

“All right. How do you want to do this, Draco?” Potter asked.

Draco took a deep shivery breath, held it, let it out. “Seven snakes, seven of us. So Lovegood will give each of you a snake, and I’ll give you their coat. Perhaps Daphne with Chang… Greg with Longbottom, I know you can handle large serpents,” he laughed darkly, “Millicent with Granger, I think…”

When snakes and coats were both distributed, they stood in a loose circle. Longbottom said uncertainly, “So now we just… put the coats on them?”

“Unless anyone has any better ideas!” snapped Draco, feeling both dread and his lack of sleep catching up to him.

“I wish we had any written historical documentation about the curse,” said Granger mournfully. “Oh goodness, I had better start writing this down—”

Lovegood cut in kindly. “Make sure you support their bodies, and just let them make their own way into the coats.”

“Daphne is… she’s squeezing me…” Chang said, sounding anxious.

“She just doesn’t want to fall. Maybe you can sit on the ground?”

Merlin and Morgana both, Draco didn’t think this slapdash curse-breaking ceremony could possibly induce any more anxiety in him. There were so many variables, so many moving pieces! Did _he_ need to be the one stuffing each snake into their coat? Were they close enough to the water? As he listened to the others’ chatter and tried to coax Blaise into the most brittle coat of them all, he spared one last spiteful thought for the twelfth century witches and their bloody farming superstitions.

“Nearly there,” Potter murmured beside him, and Draco wondered if Potter was speaking to him, or to Pansy.

And just when the cold and the uncertainty were about to break Draco’s last vestige of calm, Caleb murmured, “Something’s happening.”

“Oh, how beautiful,” Lovegood whispered.

“I don’t care if it’s beautiful!” Draco shouted, on the verge of hysteria. “What’s going on?”

“It’s, er, there’s a lot of light—” Potter stuttered. Draco could have wept from frustration.

Across the circle from him, Granger spoke. “The _Serpens_ is glowing. It’s doing something odd… What’s—”

* * *

…

… 

_Hey, old man, wake up._

_…Blaise?_

_Finally._

He swam back into consciousness and breathed in. The air was warm and fragrant, like honey and vanilla and Quidditch in the springtime. He was weightless. All around him were shifting, solid shapes. Something feather-light flicked softly against his ear.

_I’m not dead, am I?_

_You will be once I get my hands on you_ , Pansy retorted, and Draco’s chest grew tight at the dulcet and beloved sound of her voice. _Feeding me mice and insects! Ugh! It’s truly beyond what any witch should have to suffer. I want nothing but medium-rare steak from The Ritz for the rest of my life, do you hear me?_ She slithered over him, twining across his bare arms and chest.

 _Hear, hear_ , hissed Theo.

 _We do a really nice filet mignon at the restaurant. Garlic butter and shallots with a dijon reduction._ Greg’s broad, scaly body was pressed against Draco’s back, just a few degrees shy of warm.

 _All right, all right, let’s rein it in, shall we?_ Astoria cut in. _Draco, love, let’s get out of this mess. Listen carefully and repeat._

O SERPENTĒS. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, all around him, inside his head. It was the _Serpens Obumbratio_ , the little figurine in its velvet box.

_O what?_

O SERPENTĒS.

 _O SERPENTĒS_ , he spoke-thought obediently.

EXPELLITE VOS LORICIS ET MŪTĀTE IN HOMINIBUS.

_EXPELLIwhat?_

_Just say it, Draco!_ Daphne and Millie said in unison.

 _EXPELLITE VOS— VOS LORI—_ He struggled to recall the words.

_Hurry up, would you? I think my coat’s breaking. Rather shoddy workmanship, old man._

_No!_

_Draco, please, the spell_ , Theo cried.

_Oh, look out! It’s unravelling… I say…_

_No!!!_ Draco shouted-thought in anguish. He sensed their tenuous connection flicker and strain. The temperature began to plummet ominously. _Please, oh Salazar and Merlin and god. Please. I’ll do anything. Blaise!_

He reached out towards Blaise’s voice and felt like he’d plunged his bare hands into the flame of seven suns. The star-thorn burrowed into the soft flesh of his palms, drawing blood. The coat was indeed unravelling, disintegrating in his grasp, pieces flying everywhere.

SPEAK THE SPELL, O CHOSEN ONE  
AND FINISH WHAT THOU HAST BEGUN.

 _Not without Blaise!_ He wondered where he was, and where Potter and Granger and the others were. Had he disappeared from the frigid lakeside and left them behind? Could they see him?

YOUR CLOTH IS FRAIL, THE TENDRILS BREAK.  
THIS ONE SHALL REMAIN A SNAKE.

 _Fuck you!_ Draco spat. _I’m taking them all back, do you hear me? I need help…_

IF THOU CALLST FOR AID TO THEE  
NEVER AGAIN SHALT THOU SEE. The _Serpens_ sounded a bit tetchy now.

 _Does it look like I give a shit?_ Draco gritted his teeth as he tried to catch the pieces of the star-thorn coat and hold them around Blaise. It was an exercise in futility. He had a hard enough time handling the coats when he was seated at his loom—trying to reassemble one in midair as it fell apart, around a squirming snake, _blind_ …

The wild wind was thrashing them about in a fury. A multitude of thorns sank into his back, legs, and sides as the snakes wound tightly around him, hanging on for dear life. He could feel blood running wet and warm down his forearms where Blaise’s coat had scored his palms.

Draco sobbed and thought of Potter—but not just Potter. _Potter and him_. Potter’s nose cold on his cheek as he leaned them against the spectators’ steps of the Quidditch pitch. Potter handing him a cup of sloppily-prepared earl grey tea. Their fingers intertwined so tightly that nothing could ever come between them.

He felt the surefire tingle of magic in his arm even before he spoke the words.

_Expecto Patronum!_

And then there was another presence in the liminal space with them, something awaiting orders. A Dementor to destroy? A message to deliver? It folded something soft like feathers around him protectively as the _Serpens_ thrashed in anger.

 _Find Harry Potter_ , Draco told his Patronus. _Tell him I’m breaking the curse and he’d better have everyone ready to cast Cushioning and Warming Charms. Go._

There was a soft _whoosh_ , followed by another wave of vexation from the omnipresent giant snake. 

THE SERPENTS’ BOND MAY NEVER—

 _EXPELLITE VOS LORICIS ET MŪTĀTE IN HOMINIBUS_ , Draco shouted, clamping down with both hands around the broken pieces of Blaise’s coat. And as the last word left his lips, there was a dreadful shriek that rattled his bones and shook the sky. He registered something behind his eyes stretch, strain, and finally break.

Draco fell.

* * *

He was vaguely aware of someone calling his name, and holding him so hard it was difficult to breathe.

He heard many voices: sobbing, laughing, babbling.

He opened his eyes and saw nothing. So that was normal, then.

He faded back into oblivion.

* * *

The sharp smell of the Hospital Wing was the first thing he noticed. Draco blanched, recoiling, and shifted on an uncomfortably thin mattress.

“He’s awake!”

“Miss Parkinson!”

Before anyone could stop her, Pansy shrieked and launched herself onto Draco’s bed, knocking all the air out of him and elbowing him painfully in the chin. Her arms—her very human arms—clung to him as she wept.

He heard the distinct affronted huff of Madam Pomfrey as several others joined Pansy: the familiar bulk of Greg, the boniness of Theo, Millie who always smelled like a fresh-baked cake. They all piled into his cot, chattering over one another and trying, unsuccessfully, to shove Pansy out of the way.

“You did it, you beautiful son of a bitch!”

“I can’t believe—”

“—worst two months of my life—”

“Please!” shouted Pomfrey, but it was no good trying to tell seven Slytherins what to do. Tears poured down Draco’s face as he laughed. His palms—covered in bandages, he now realised—roved over seven sets of warm, grasping hands.

They did let up eventually, a little, and most of them even climbed out of his bed. Pansy stayed, her arm looped around Draco’s waist as if _she_ was the one who needed a guide. She was shaking a little and Draco slung his arm around her shoulders. Pomfrey began to run a set of diagnostic spells, including a set for his eyes, even when Draco told her not to bother. That inspired a fresh wave of tears from Pansy (and what sounded like Theo, standing beside them). Then the Hospital Wing doors opened and even more people poured in.

“He’s awake!” Caleb cried.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake.” Pomfrey gave up on the spells as Caleb, Lovegood, Granger, and the rest all piled in. He caught snippets of the overlapping conversation, but not the one voice he longed to hear above all the rest.

“It was the craziest thing,” Chang told him. “You and the snakes all floated into the air and we could see your silhouettes but—”

“— _fascinating_ to witness; I’m submitting my report to the International Federation of Curse-Breakers—”

“—and there was this huge shape in the sky—”

“—your Patronus came flying out and we heard it tell Harry—”

“Where is he?” Draco said, the first words he'd spoken since waking.

And he felt him, of course, when the Hospital Wing doors opened yet again. Draco’s face bore an enormous smile as a pair of worn, scuffed trainers squeaked towards him.

“You did it,” Potter said, coming to sit on his other side and slipping their hands together. Pansy’s arm tightened possessively around Draco's waist.

“Is it true that you… your eyes…?” Potter asked. He touched his free hand to cradle Draco’s face, drawing his thumb beneath one of Draco’s eyes with something akin to wonder.

“I had to do it. They were going to keep Blaise,” said Draco into the suddenly quiet room. He lifted his chin defiantly. “I'd never let them, obviously. I don't care if it's a demented old janitor or an immortal snake entity. No one threatens my friends.”

“Cheers, old man,” said Blaise with a break in his voice, as Daphne and Astoria gave a set of wet sniffles.

“McGonagall has tons of questions for you,” said Chang. “She wants to know all about the _Serpens_ and the actual breaking of the curse. I think there are some Unspeakables downstairs who want to interview you too.”

“What _I_ want to know is how you were able to cast a Patronus,” Caleb said. “I thought you couldn’t—”

“It was simply a matter of choosing the right memory,” Draco replied smoothly. “It’s basic Defensive theory, really. You can’t cast a Patronus thinking about someone else’s happy thoughts. The memory has to involve the caster, to draw power from within. That’s why it didn’t work before, when I thought of Potter. It’s not enough to think of somebody you love; you have to think of—”

He realised what he’d said just as Millie and Granger squeaked, _“WHAT?”_ in unison and Chang, Blaise, and Caleb all tried to shout over each other. Draco covered his flaming face in his bandaged hands, and tried to hide in the protective embrace of Potter’s arm.

“I was going to ask who you were spending all your time with while we were cursed,” Pansy said in a low voice. “You have to tell me _everything_. Is he all you wanted and more?”

“I’m right here, you know!” Potter exclaimed, although Draco definitely heard him smiling. “Malfoy, I—”

“Yes, I know. I heard it from Weasley’s mother, of all people.” And then it was Potter’s turn to blush; Draco felt the cheek pressed against his own grow distinctly warm.

“I do like your Patronus, Draco,” said Lovegood. “A swan is very fitting.”

“Why?” Potter grinned against Draco’s hair. “Because they’re pale with long, slender necks and they peck people they don’t like?”

“No,” Draco whispered in his ear, beneath the laughter of all of their friends. “It’s because they mate for life.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! You can show your appreciation for the author in a comment below. ♥
> 
> This story is part of HD Erised, an on-going anonymous fest. The author will be revealed January 10th.


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